On one of the first days of May, some six months after old Mr. Touchett’s death, a small group that might have been described by a painter as composing well was gathered in one of the many rooms of an ancient villa¹ crowning an olive-muffled hill outside of the Roman gate of Florence. The villa was a long, rather blank-looking structure, with the far-projecting roof which Tuscany loves and which, on the hills that encircle Florence, when considered from a distance, makes so harmonious² a rectangle with the straight, dark, definite cypresses³ that usually rise in groups of three or four beside it. The house had a front upon a little grassy⁴, empty, rural piazza⁵ which occupied a part of the hill-top; and this front, pierced with a few windows in irregular relations and furnished with a stone bench lengthily⁶ adjusted to the base of the structure and useful as a lounging-place to one or two persons wearing more or less of that air of undervalued merit which in Italy, for some reason or other, always gracefully⁷ invests any one who confidently assumes a perfectly⁸ passive attitude — this antique, solid, weather-worn, yet imposing⁹ front had a somewhat incommunicative character. It was the mask, not the face of the house. It had heavy lids, but no eyes; the house in reality looked another way — looked off behind, into splendid openness and the range of the afternoon light. In that quarter the villa overhung the slope of its hill and the long valley of the Arno, hazy¹⁰ with Italian colour. It had a narrow garden, in the manner of a terrace, productive chiefly of

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