Chapter 22

Summary

ON one of the first days of May, some six months after old Mr. Touchett's death, a picturesque little group was gathered in one of the many rooms of an ancient villa which stood on the summit of an olive-muffled hill, outside of the Roman gate of Florence. The villa was a long, rather blanklooking structure, with the far-projecting roof which Tuscany loves, and which, on the hills that encircle Florence, when looked at from a distance, makes so harmonious a rectangle with the straight, dark, definite cypresses that usually rise, in groups of three or four, beside it. The house had a front upon a little grassy, empty, rural piazza 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 which ran along the base of the structure and usually afforded a lounging-place to one or two persons wearing more or less of that air of under-valued merit which in Italy, for some reason or other, always gracefully invests any one who confidently assumes a perfectly passive attitude—this ancient, solid, weather-worn, yet imposing front, had a somewhat incommunicative character. It was the mask of the house; it was not its face. 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, hazy with Italian colour. It had a narrow garden, in the manner of a terrace, productive chiefly of tangles of wild roses and old stone benches, mossy and sun-warmed. The parapet of the terrace was just the height to lean upon, and beneath it the ground declined into the vagueness of olive-crops and vineyards. It is not, however, with the outside of the place that we are concerned; on this bright morning of ripened spring its tenants had reason to prefer the shady side of the wall. The windows of the ground-floor, as you saw them from the piazza, were, in their noble proportions, extremely architectural; but their function seemed to be less to offer communication with the world than to defy the world to look in. They were massively cross-barred and placed at such a height that curiosity, even on tip-toe, expired before it reached them.