Full sense of the enchantment of it all looked out of the girl's
face. Wonder sat on her forehead, and on her parted lips. It
was a face serious, either with persistent purpose or with some
momentary trouble, yet full of an exquisite hunger for life and
light and space. Eyes and hair and curving cheek,--all the
girl's sensitive being seemed struggling to accept the gift of
beauty before her, almost too great to grasp.

"After this," she said half aloud, her far glance resting on Rome
in the hazy distance, "anything is possible."

"I don't seem real," she added, touching her left hand with the
forefinger of her right. "It is Italy, ITALY, and that is Rome.
Can all this exist within two weeks of the rush and jangle of
Broadway?"

There was no answer, and she half closed her eyes, intoxicated
with beauty.

A live thing darted across her foot, and she looked down to catch
a glimpse of something like a slender green flame licking its way
through the grass.

"Lizards crawling over me unrebuked," she said smiling. "Perhaps
the millenium has come."

She picked two grass blades and a single fern.

They aren't real, you know," she said, addressing herself. "This