But
Helen developed a certain want of sympathy towards the end that
disappointed Miss Winchelsea a little. She refused to see "anything" in
the face of Beatrice Cenci--Shelley's Beatrice Cenci!--in the Barberini
Gallery; and one day, when they were deploring the electric trams, she
said rather snappishly that "people must get about somehow, and it's
better than torturing horses up these horrid little hills." She spoke of
the Seven Hills of Rome as "horrid little hills "!
And the day they went on the Palatine--though Miss Winchelsea did not know
of this--she remarked suddenly to Fanny, "Don't hurry like that, my dear;
_they_ don't want us to overtake them. And we don't say the right
things for them when we _do_ get near."
"I wasn't trying to overtake them," said Fanny, slackening her excessive
pace; "I wasn't indeed." And for a minute she was short of breath.
But Miss Winchelsea had come upon happiness. It was only when she came to
look back across an intervening tragedy that she quite realised how happy
she had been pacing among the cypress-shadowed ruins, and exchanging the
very highest class of information the human mind can possess, the most
refined impressions it is possible to convey.
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