old. At twenty-five I shouldn't have been afraid of myself at fifty-two.
Camerino was thirty-four--and then the others! She was always at home in
the evening, and they all used to come. They were old Florentine names.
But she used to let me stay after them all; she thought an old English
name as good. What a transcendent coquette! . . . But _basta cosi_ as
she used to say. I meant to go tonight to Casa Salvi, but I couldn't
bring myself to the point. I don't know what I'm afraid of; I used to be
in a hurry enough to go there once. I suppose I am afraid of the very
look of the place--of the old rooms, the old walls. I shall go tomorrow
night. I am afraid of the very echoes.

10th.--She has the most extraordinary resemblance to her mother. When I
went in I was tremendously startled; I stood starting at her. I have
just come home; it is past midnight; I have been all the evening at Casa
Salvi. It is very warm--my window is open--I can look out on the river
gliding past in the starlight. So, of old, when I came home, I used to
stand and look out. There are the same cypresses on the opposite hills.

Poor young Stanmer was there, and three or four other admirers; they all
got up when I came in. I think I had been talked about, and there was
some curiosity. But why should I have been talked about? They were all
youngish men--none of them of my time. She is a wonderful likeness of
her mother; I couldn't get over it. Beautiful like her mother, and yet
with the same faults in her face; but with her mother's perfect head and
brow and sympathetic, almost pitying, eyes. Her face has just that
peculiarity of her mother's, which, of all human countenances that I have
ever known, was the one that passed most quickly and completely from the
expression of gaiety to that of repose. Repose in her face always
suggested sadness; and while you were watching it with a kind of awe, and
wondering of what tragic secret it was the token, it kindled, on the