Veronica turned her back upon the villa, as she had turned from the
great palace in the Toledo. They whispered to her that the peasant's
rent must not be reduced, for he was well able to pay, and they pointed
to the closely planted vines and vegetables and olives that stretched
far away to right and left, where she remembered in her dreams of far
childhood that there had been lawns and walks and flowers. The man, she
was told, was not the only peasant on the place. There were other houses
now, and huts that could shelter a family, and there was land, land,
always more land, as far as she could see, all as closely and neatly
and regularly planted with vegetables and grain, vines and olives; and
it was all hers, and yielded enormous rents which were wisely invested.
She was very rich indeed, but to her it all seemed horribly sordid and
grinding and mean--and the peasants looked prematurely old, labour-worn,
filthy, wretchedly poor. If she had even had any satisfaction from so
much wealth, it might have seemed different. She said so, in her heart.
She was accustomed to tell her confessor that she was proud and
uncharitable and unfeeling--not finding any real misdeeds to confess.
She was willing to believe that she was all that and much more. If she
had been living in the whirling, golden pleasure-storm of an utterly
thoughtless world, she believed herself bad enough to have shut her
memory's eyes to the haggard peasant-mother of the dirty half-clad
children--to all the hundreds of them who doubtless lived just like the
one she had seen, all upon her lands; she could have forgotten the
busy-thieving, sodden-faced crowd that thronged the chambers wherein her
fathers had been born and had feasted kings and had died--the very room
where her own father had lain dead. She could have shut it all out, she
thought, if she had held in her hands the gold that all this brought, to
scatter it at her will; for she was sure that she had not a better heart
than other girls of her age. But she had never seen it. The reality of