the wide highway, Vivian Bell talked with her usual transcendentalism.
As they were descending among houses pink and white, gardens and terraces
ornamented with statues and fountains, she showed to her friend the
villa, hidden under bluish pines, where the ladies and the cavaliers of
the Decameron took refuge from the plague that ravaged Florence, and
diverted one another with tales frivolous, facetious, or tragic. Then
she confessed the thought which had come to her the day before.

"You had gone, darling, to Carmine with Monsieur Dechartre, and you had
left at Fiesole Madame Marmet, who is an agreeable person, a moderate and
polished woman. She knows many anecdotes about persons of distinction
who live in Paris. And when she tells them, she does as my cook
Pompaloni does when he serves eggs: he does not put salt in them, but he
puts the salt-cellar next to them. Madame Marmet's tongue is very sweet,
but the salt is near it, in her eyes. Her conversation is like
Pompaloni's dish, my love--each one seasons to his taste. Oh, I like
Madame Marmet a great deal. Yesterday, after you had gone, I found her
alone and sad in a corner of the drawing-room. She was thinking
mournfully of her husband. I said to her: 'Do you wish me to think of
your husband, too? I will think of him with you. I have been told that
he was a learned man, a member of the Royal Society of Paris. Madame
Marmet, talk to me of him.' She replied that he had devoted himself to
the Etruscans, and that he had given to them his entire life. Oh,
darling, I cherished at once the memory of that Monsieur Marmet, who
lived for the Etruscans. And then a good idea came to me. I said to
Madame Marmet, 'We have at Fiesole, in the Pretorio Palace, a modest
little Etruscan museum. Come and visit it with me. Will you?' She
replied it was what she most desired to see in Italy. We went to the
Pretorio Palace; we saw a lioness and a great many little bronze figures,
grotesque, very fat or very thin. The Etruscans were a seriously gay