ghorn, so I bought it, and now
I know as much as Brown does about the country through which we passed
during several perfect days.

I'm not sure, but I am being both brutal and banal in saying that the
rest of our journey to Rome was comparatively uninteresting. Of course,
nothing can be _really_ uninteresting in Italy, but I suppose those
first days had spoiled me. We drove for mile after mile through marshy
land, where tall, melancholy eucalyptus trees told their tale of a brave
struggle against malaria. All the windows and doors of the signal cabins
by the railway stations were protected by wire gauze against mosquitoes,
and we who have spent summers on Staten Island know what _that_ means,
don't we?

I think, if I were not in Rome, I could have written you a better
account of our flight through Italy; but the Eternal City has blurred
all other impressions for me now, though I think afterwards they will
come back as clear and bright as ever. Nevertheless, I'm not going to
write you much about Rome. It's too big for my pen, too mighty and too
marvellous. I can only feel. You have been here, and Rome doesn't
change. Only I _wonder_ what you felt when you first saw the Laocoon and
the Apollo Belvedere? I used to think I didn't quite appreciate
sculpture, but now I know it was because something in me was waiting for
the _best_, and refusing to be satisfied with what was less than the
best. Why, I didn't even know what _marble_ could be till I saw the
Laocoon. I had meant to do a good deal of sight-seeing that day when I
began with the Vatican; but I sat for hours in front of those writhing
figures in their eternal torture. I couldn't go away. The statue seemed
to belong to me, and I had found it again, after searching hundreds and
hundreds of years. I wonder if I was once a princess in the palace of
the Caesars, in another state of existence, and if in those days I used
to stand and worship the Laocoon? I shouldn't wonder a bit. And the
Apollo Belvedere! What a gentleman--what a _perfect gentleman_ he is!
You will laugh at me for such a thought. It seems commonplace, but it
isn't. Nobody's ever said it before. He's such a gentleman and so
graciously beautiful that you know he must be a god. I shouldn't have
minded worshipping him a bit. Paganism had its points.

I should love to come back to Rome on my wedding trip if I were married
to exactly the right man; but if he were not _exactly_ right I should
kill him; wherea