s locked and sealed. He remembered Eunice Goodward--the
fact of her--how tall she was as she walked beside him--but not how at
the soft brushing of her hair as she turned, his blood had sung to her;
nor all the weeks of their engagement like a morning full of wings. And
he could not yet recall so much as the bare reasons for her break with
him except that they had been unhappy ones.

It had been a part of a long plan that he and Eunice should have seen
Italy together, but for the moment he did not wish her there. He was
sure she would have been in the way of his getting something that
glimmered at him from the coign of castellated walls all awash about
their base with purpled shadow, that strove to say itself in intricate
fine tracery of tower and shrine, and failed and fell away before the
sodden quality of his mind.

So he drifted northward with the spring, and saw the anemones blowing
and the bloomy violet wonder the world, suffering incredible aching
intimations of the recrudescence of desire. Afterward he came to
Florence, where he had heard there were pictures, and hoped to have some
peace; but at Florence they were all too busy being painted or prayed
to, the remote Madonnas, the wounded Saints, the comfortable plump
Venuses; the lean Christs too stupefied with candle smoke to take any
account of an American gentleman in a plain business suit, who looked
homely and ill and competent. Sometimes in Santa Croce or in the long
gallery over the bridge, the noise of the city would remove from him and
the faces would waver and lean out of their frames, as if, had the
occasion allowed, they would have said the word to set him on his way.
But there was always a guard about or a tourist stalking some
uncatalogued prey and it never came to anything.

"What you really want," said a man at his hotel to whom he had half
whimsically complained of their inarticulateness--one of those
remarkable individuals who had done nothing so successfully in so many
cities of Europe that he was supposed to know the exact month for doing
it most delightfully in any one of them--"what you really want is
Venice. It's an off season there; you'll meet nobody but Germans, and if
you go about in your own gondola you needn't mind them."

So Peter went to Venice, and on the way there he met the Girl from Home.

VI

He knew at once that she was from Home, though as she sat opposite him
with the fingers of her mended gloves laced under he