AS we approached Rome in the darkness I was on the qui vive for my first glimpse of it; and impatient with wonder as to what the morning would reveal. I was bound for the Hotel Continental¹—the abode², for the winter at least, of Barfleur’s mother, the widow of an Oxford³ don. I expected to encounter a severe and conservative lady of great erudition who would eye the foibles of Paris and Monte Carlo with severity.

 

“My mother,” Barfleur said, “is a very conservative person. She is greatly concerned about me. When you see her, try to cheer her up, and give her a good report of me. I don’t doubt you will find her very interesting; and it is just possible that she will take a fancy to you. She is subject to violent likes and dislikes.”

 

I fancied Mrs. Barfleur as a rather large woman with a smooth placid⁴ countenance⁵, a severe intellectual eye that would see through all my shams⁶ and make-believes on the instant.

 

It was midnight before the train arrived. It was raining; and as I pressed my nose to the window-pane viewing the beginning lamps, I saw streets and houses come into view—apartment houses, if you please, and street cars and electric arc-lights, and asphalt-paved streets, and a general atmosphere of modernity. We might have been entering Cleveland for any particular variation it presented. But just when I was commenting to myself on the strangeness of entering ancient Rome in a modern compartment⁷ car and of seeing box cars and engines,316 coal cars and flat cars loaded with heavy material, gathered on a score of parallel tracks, a touch of the ancient Rome came into view for an instant and was gone again in the dark and rain. It was an immense, desolate⁸ tomb, its arches flung heavenward in great curves, its rounded

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