a very large one that filled her villa to overflowing when the time came
for it. She lived on one of the fine avenues of the Oltrarno region, laid
out in the brief period of prosperity which Florence enjoyed as the
capital of Italy. The villa was built at that time, and it was much newer
than the house on Seventeenth street in New York, where she spent the
girlhood that had since prolonged itself beyond middle life with her. She
had first lived abroad in the Paris of the Second Empire, and she had
been one winter in Rome, but she had settled definitely in Florence
before London became an American colony, so that her friends were chiefly
Americans, though she had a wide international acquaintance. Perhaps her
habit of taking her brother's part, when he was a black sheep, inclined
her to mercy with people who had not been so blameless in their morals as
they were in their minds and manners. She exacted that they should be
interesting and agreeable, and not too threadbare; but if they had
something that decently buttoned over the frayed places, she did not
frown upon their poverty. Bohemians of all kinds liked her; Philistines
liked her too; and in such a place as Florence, where the Philistines
themselves are a little Bohemian, she might be said to be very popular.
You met persons whom you did not quite wish to meet at her house, but if
these did not meet you there, it was your loss.




XI.

On the night of the dance the line of private carriages, remises and
cabs, lined the Viale Ariosto for a mile up and down before her gates,
where young artists of both sexes arrived on foot. By this time her
passion for Clementina was at its height. She had Maddalena bring her out