"How long has this been?"

"Since I can remember."

I looked into his eyes: they were like tarnished metal mirrors reflecting
nothing. "That must be a long time," I said involuntarily.

"A long time," he assented.

I looked down on the gardens. An opulence of dahlias overran the
box-borders, between cypresses that cut the sunshine like basalt shafts.
Bees hung above the lavender; lizards sunned themselves on the benches and
slipped through the cracks of the dry basins. Everywhere were vanishing
traces of that fantastic horticulture of which our dull age has lost the
art. Down the alleys maimed statues stretched their arms like rows of
whining beggars; faun-eared terms grinned in the thickets, and above the
laurustinus walls rose the mock ruin of a temple, falling into real ruin
in the bright disintegrating air. The glare was blinding.

"Let us go in," I said.

The old man pushed open a heavy door, behind which the cold lurked like a
knife.

"The Duchess's apartments," he said.

Overhead and around us the same evanescent frescoes, under foot the same
scagliola volutes, unrolled themselves interminably. Ebony cabinets, with
inlay of precious marbles in cunning perspective, alternated down the