to her as to me? How can I tell? There was no doubt but she knew me
thoroughly. The little pleasant encroachments of mine, stolen upon her
unawares, were now never checked--I am speaking of the end of my first
year, when I could hold her hand unreproved, and kiss it as often as I
pleased. I took and kept, and exhibited to her without embarrassment,
little trifles of hers--a hair-ribbon, a garter, a little trodden Venice
slipper; if she asked for them back, it only provoked me to keep them
closer to my heart. She saw no harm in these foolish, sweet things: she
felt herself to be my senior; by comparison with her position, mine was
that of a child. To the very end she maintained the fiction that she was
my foster-mother, responsible to my parents for my advancement in
education and morals. Assuredly she taught me her tongue and kept me out
of gross iniquity; but equally certain is it that I learned more than
Italian.

I learned, however, to be very fluent in that, for, inspired by love of
Aurelia, I attacked it with extraordinary passion. All Italy, and above
all Tuscany, took sacred air from her; there grew to be an aureole about
everything which owned kinship with her. I was a severe ritualist, as
every lover is: it became a blasphemy in me to think of Aurelia in any
form of words but those of her own honey tongue. And that was of the
purest in the land. She had very little Venetian at any time, and kept
what she had for her husband and household management. To me she
employed her native speech, not the harsh staccato of Florence, a
stringent compound of the throat and the teeth, but the silken caressing
liquids of Siena, the speech of women to their lovers, of St. Catherine
to her Spouse. So I became expert in Tuscan, and after the same fashion
in Tuscany also. She was deeply and burningly proud of that land of art
and letters; she knew something of its history, something (if not much)
of its monuments. Such as it was it sufficed me. Inspired by her, I