lorence the nascent swan-feathers of Anne Champneys grew into
perfect plumage. She was like a spirit new-born to another world,
with all the dun-colored ties of a darker existence swept away, and
only a residue of thought and feeling left of its former experience.
This bright and rosy world, enriched by nature and art, was so new,
its values were so different, that at first she was dazed into
dumbness by it.

She came face to face with beauty and art made a part of daily
life. She thought she had never seen color, or flowers, or even a
real sky, until now. An existence unimaginably rich, vistas that
receded into an almost fabled past, opened and spread before her
glamourously. The vividness of her impressions, her reaction to
this new phase of experience, the whole-souled ardor with which
she flung herself into the study of Italian, her eagerness to know
more, her delight in the fine old house in which they had set up
their household gods, amused and charmed Mrs. Vandervelde. She
felt as if she were teaching and training an unspoiled, delighted,
and delightful child, and contact with this fresh and eager spirit
stimulated her own.

Many of her former school friends, girls belonging to fine
Florentine families, some now noble matrons, mothers of families,
one or two great conventual superioresses, still resided in the
city, and these welcomed their beloved Marcia delightedly. There
were, too, the American and English colonies, and a coterie of
well-known artists. Marcia Vandervelde was a born hostess, a center
around which the brightest and cleverest naturally revolved. She
changed the large, drafty rooms of the old palace into charming
reflections of her own personality. A woman of wide sympathies and
cultivated tastes, she delighted in the clever cosmopolitan society
that gathered in her drawing-room; and it was in this opalescent
social sea that she launched young Mrs. Champneys.

Mrs. Champneys was at first but a mild success, a sort of pale
luminosity reflected from the more dominant Mrs. Vandervelde. But it
so happened, that a gifted young Italian lost his heart at sight to
her red hair and green eyes, and discovering that she had no heart
of her own--at least, none for him--he wrote, in a sort of frenzy of
inspiration, a very fine sonnet sequence narrating his hapless
passion. The poet had been as extravagantly assertive as poets in
love usually are, and the sonnets were really notable; so the young
man was s