One day, in the afternoon, the two young men took a long stroll
together. They followed the winding footway that led toward Como, close
to the lake-side, past the gates of villas and the walls of vineyards,
through little hamlets propped on a dozen arches, and bathing their feet
and their pendant tatters in the gray-green ripple; past frescoed walls
and crumbling campaniles and grassy village piazzas, and the mouth
of soft ravines that wound upward, through belts of swinging vine and
vaporous olive and splendid chestnut, to high ledges where white chapels
gleamed amid the paler boskage, and bare cliff-surfaces, with their
sun-cracked lips, drank in the azure light. It all was confoundingly
picturesque; it was the Italy that we know from the steel engravings in
old keepsakes and annuals, from the vignettes on music-sheets and
the drop-curtains at theatres; an Italy that we can never confess to
ourselves--in spite of our own changes and of Italy's--that we have
ceased to believe in. Rowland and Roderick turned aside from the little
paved footway that clambered and dipped and wound and doubled beside
the lake, and stretched themselves idly beneath a fig-tree, on a grassy
promontory.
Pages:
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568