toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other,
shouting; men drinking, playing mora, quarrelling, laughing,
singing, twanging mandolines, at the tables under the withered
bush of the wine-shop; and two or three more pensive citizens
swinging their legs from the parapet of the bridge, and angling
for fish that never bit, in the impetuous stream below.

Peter looked at these things; and, it is to be presumed, he saw
them. But, for all the joy they gave him, he, this cultivator
of the sense of beauty, might have been the basest unit of his
own purblind Anglo-Saxon public. They were the background for
an absent figure. They were the stage-accessories of a drama
whose action was arrested. They were an empty theatre.

He tried to read. He had brought a trunkful of books to Villa
Floriano; but that book had been left behind which could fix
his interest now.

He tried to write--and wondered, in a kind of daze, that any
man should ever have felt the faintest ambition to do a thing
so thankless and so futile.

"I shall never write again. Writing," he generalised, and
possibly not without some reason, "when it is n't the sordidest
of trades, is a mere fatuous assertion of one's egotism.
Breaking stones in the street were a nobler occupation; weaving
ropes of sand were better sport. The only things that are
worth writing are inexpressible, and can't be written. The
only things that can be written are obvious and worthless--the
very crackling of thorns under a pot. Oh, why does n't she