Often, when she had begun with looking intently at a picture, her
silence, after an interval, made him turn and glance at her. He usually
found that if she was looking at the picture still, she was not seeing
it. Her eyes were fixed, but her thoughts were wandering, and an image
more vivid than any that Raphael or Titian had drawn had superposed
itself upon the canvas. She asked fewer questions than before, and
seemed to have lost heart for consulting guide-books and encyclopaedias.
From time to time, however, she uttered a deep, full murmur of
gratification. Florence in midsummer was perfectly void of travelers,
and the dense little city gave forth its aesthetic aroma with a larger
frankness, as the nightingale sings when the listeners have departed.
The churches were deliciously cool, but the gray streets were stifling,
and the great, dove-tailed polygons of pavement as hot to the tread as
molten lava. Rowland, who suffered from intense heat, would have found
all this uncomfortable in solitude; but Florence had never charmed him
so completely as during these midsummer strolls with his preoccupied
companion.
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