t she might have
wished to inflict a humiliation, a punishment upon him, or else that she
had merely indulged in a whim in order to inflame his desire afresh. The
next moment he called to the coachman--

'Piazza del Quirinale.'

He yielded to the attraction of Maria Ferres; he abandoned himself once
more to the vaguely tender sentiment which, ever since his visit in the
afternoon, had left, as it were, a perfume in his soul and suggested to
him thoughts and images of poetic beauty. The recent disappointment,
proving, as he considered, Elena's malice and indifference, urged him
more strongly than ever towards the love and goodness of the other. His
regret for the loss of so beautiful a night increased, under the
influence of the vision he had dreamed just now. And, truth to tell, it
was one of the most enchanting nights Rome had ever known; one of those
spectacles that oppress the human soul with deep sadness, because they
transcend all power of admiration, all possibility of human expression.

The Piazza del Quirinale, magnified by the all-pervading whiteness, lay
spread out solitary and dazzling, like an Olympian acropolis above the
silent city. The edifices surrounding it reared their stately
proportions into the deep sky; Bernini's great portal to the royal
palace surmounted by the loggia offered an optical delusion by seeming
to detach itself from the building and stand out all alone in all its
unwieldy magnificence, like some mausoleum sculptured out of a meteoric
block of stone. The rich architraves to the Palazzo della Consulta were
curiously transformed by the accumulated masses of snow. Sublime amidst
the uniform whiteness, the colossal statues seemed to dominate all
things. The grouping of the Dioscuri and the horses looked bolder and
larger in that light; the broad backs of the steeds glittered under
jewelled trappings, there was a sparkle as of diamonds on the shoulders
and the uplifted arm of each demi-god.

An august solemnity flowed from the monument. Rome lay plunged in a
death-like silence, motionless, empty--a city under a spell. The houses,
the churches, the spires and turrets, all the confusion and
intermingling of Christian and Pagan architecture, resolved itself into
one unbroken forest between the heights of the Janiculum and the Monte
Mario, drowned in a silvery vapour, far off, infinitely immaterial,
reminding one a little of a lunar landscape, calling up visions of some
half extinct planet