e background which had tempted her.

"It isn't so bad, being elderly," he said. "By that time we have
accumulated enough past to sit down and really enjoy its associations. We
have got all sorts of perspectives and points of view. We know where we
are at."

"I don't mind being elderly. The world's just as amusing as ever, and
lots of disagreeable things have dropped out. It's the getting more than
elderly; it's the getting old; and then--"

They shrank a little closer together, and walked on in silence till he
said, "Perhaps there's something else, something better--somewhere."

They had reached the balustraded terrace, and were pausing for pleasure
in the garden tops below, with the flowery spaces, and the statued
fountains all coming together. She put her hand on one of the fat little
urchin-groups on the stone coping. "I don't want cherubs, when I can have
these putti. And those old prince-bishops didn't, either!"

"I don't suppose they kept a New England conscience," he said, with a
vague smile. "It would be difficult in the presence of the rococo."

They left the garden through the beautiful gate which the old court
ironsmith Oegg hammered out in lovely forms of leaves and flowers, and
shaped laterally upward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand, in
gracious Louis Quinze curves; and they looked back at it in the kind of
despair which any perfection inspires. They said how feminine it was, how
exotic, how expressive of a luxurious ideal of life which art had
purified and left eternally charming. They remembered their Ruskinian
youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it;
and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly
admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that
time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once
influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously
found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under a
rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity. The vast superb palace of the
prince bishops, which was now to house a whole troop of sovereigns,
imperial, royal, grand ducal and ducal, swelled aloft in superb
amplitude; but it did not realize their historic pride so effectively as
this exquisite work of the court ironsmith. It related itself in its
aerial beauty to that of the Tiepolo frescoes which the travellers knew
were swimming and soaring on the ceilings within, and from w