I love you more than words can say, Andrew:
She was still young. With her pure and regular profile, her pale gold
hair parted and knotted very low on her neck, she looked like a beauty
in a Keepsake. A certain affectation of aestheticism clung to her since
her liaison with the poet-painter Adolphus Jeckyll, a disciple in poetry
of Keats, in painting of Holman Hunt; a composer of obscure sonnets, a
painter of subjects from the _Vita Nuova_. She had sat to him for a
_Sibylla Palmifera_ and a _Madonna with the Lily_. She had also sat to
Andrea for a study of the head of Isabella in Boccaccio's story. Art
therefore had conferred upon her the stamp of nobility. But, at bottom,
she possessed no spiritual qualities whatsoever; she even became
tiresome in the long-run by reason of that sentimental romanticism so
often affected by English _demi-mondaines_ which contrasts so strangely
with the depravity of their licentiousness.
'Who would have thought that we should ever be together again, Andrew?'
An hour later, Andrea left her and returned to the Palazzo Zuccari by
the little flight of steps leading from the Piazza Mignanelli to the
Trinita. The murmur of the city floated up the solitary little stairway
through the mild air of the October evening. The stars twinkled in a
cool pure sky. Down below, at the Palazzo Casteldelfina, the shrubs
inside the little gate cast vague uncertain shadows in the mysterious
light, like marine plants waving at the bottom of an aquarium.
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