was irritated by this survival of medieval
manners, though as I liked the old I suppose I ought to have liked it;
but I was so determined to be genial that I took my false card out of
my pocket and held it up to her, smiling as if it were a magic token. It
had the effect of one indeed, for it brought her, as I say, all the way
down. I begged her to hand it to her mistress, having first written
on it in Italian the words, "Could you very kindly see a gentleman,
an American, for a moment?" The little maid was not hostile, and I
reflected that even that was perhaps something gained. She colored,
she smiled and looked both frightened and pleased. I could see that my
arrival was a great affair, that visits were rare in that house, and
that she was a person who would have liked a sociable place. When she
pushed forward the heavy door behind me I felt that I had a foot in the
citadel. She pattered across the damp, stony lower hall and I followed
her up the high staircase--stonier still, as it seemed--without an
invitation. I think she had meant I should wait for her below, but such
was not my idea, and I took up my station in the sala. She flitted, at
the far end of it, into impenetrable regions, and I looked at the place
with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist's parlor.
It was gloomy and stately, but it owed its character almost entirely
to its noble shape and to the fine architectural doors--as high as
the doors of houses--which, leading into the various rooms, repeated
themselves on either side at intervals. They were surmounted with old
faded painted escutcheons, and here and there, in the spaces between
them, brown pictures, which I perceived to be bad, in battered frames,
were suspended. With the exception of several straw-bottomed chairs with
their backs to the wall, the grand obscure vista contained nothing else
to minister to effect. It was evidently never used save as a passage,
and little even as that. I may add that by the time the door opened
again through which the maidservant had escaped, my eyes had grown used
to the want of light.

I had not meant by my private ejaculation that I must myself cultivate
the soil of the tangled enclosure which lay beneath the windows, but the
lady who came toward me from the distance over the hard, shining floor
might have supposed as much from the way in which, as I went rapidly to
meet her, I exclaimed, taking care to speak Italian: "The garden, the
garden