of the sea as we went towards it.

VII.

PALACE YARDS.

Yesterday P. D. P. took me to see a former Marescotti palace in the
Via della Pigna. A very quiet aristocratic part of Rome, of narrow
streets between high palaces, and little untraversed squares. The
gloominess of the outside succeeded by the sunlight, the spaciousness
of a vast courtyard, on to which look sixteenth-, seventeenth-,
eighteenth-century windows, closed by the back of a church with its
clock-tower, so that, as Pierino says, it might almost be the piazza
of a provincial town. A campanile, fountain, piazza, almost a _sun_,
all to oneself. One wonders with what these palaces could ever have
been filled by the original owners.

We then went into another palace yard; and there was a shop with three
young men working at a huge sawdust doll, with porcelain sandalled
feet. I thought it was a doll for displaying surgical apparatus, but
it turned out to be a female saint, whose head we were shown,
life-size, properly expressive with rolling eyes and a little halo.

_March_ 6.

SPRING 1903.

I.

RETURN TO ROME.

That I should feel it most on return here; find I have returned
without _her_, travelled without her, that she is not there to tell;
the sense of utter loneliness, of the letter one would write, the
greeting one would give--and which no creature now wants!

Yesterday morning, feeling ill and very sad, Rome came for half-hour
with its odd consolation. I sat on the balcony of the corner room,
very high up, in the sunshine. Cabs, with their absurd Roman canter,
crossing the diaper of the little square, circling, as I remember them
doing in my childhood, round the unwilling fare. A soldier rode
across, dismounted, took his beast by the bridle to the cattle-trough
in the palace wall opposite; a bit of campagna intruded into town. And
motor-cars snorted and bells rang. High up on the same level with me
was the hidden real Rome--all that you do not guess while walking in
the streets below. Colonna gardens with bridges over the way, and
green-clipped hedges and reddening Judas-trees under the big pines,
and a row of marble Emperors turning their backs; and, further, the
Quirinal with tip of obelisk, and plaster trumpet-blowing Fame; and a
palm-tree, its head rising out of I know not what hidden yard, in
front of a terrace of drying rags. And at every vista end, pines of
the Pincian, Villa Doria, &c.; and domes; and the pale blond r