Towards spring Harriett showed signs of depression, and they took her to
the south of France and to Bordighera and Rome. In Rome she recovered.
Rome was one of those places you ought to see; she had always been anxious
to do the right thing. In the little Pension in the Via Babuino she had a
sense of her own importance and the importance of her father and mother.
They were Mr. and Mrs. Hilton Frean, and Miss Harriett Frean, seeing Rome.

After their return in the summer he began to write his book, _The Social
Order_. There were things that had to be said; it did not much matter
who said them provided they were said plainly. He dreamed of a new Social
State, society governing itself without representatives. For a long time
they lived on the interest and excitement of the book, and when it came
out Harriett pasted all his reviews very neatly into an album. He had the
air of not taking them quite seriously; but he subscribed to _The
Spectator_, and sometimes an article appeared there understood to have
been written by Hilton Frean.

And they went abroad again every year. They went to Florence and came home
and read _Romola_ and Mrs. Browning and Dante and _The Spectator_; they
went to Assisi and read the _Little Flowers of Saint Francis;_ they went
to Venice and read Ruskin and _The Spectator;_ they went to Rome again and
read Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. Harriett said, "We
should have enjoyed Rome more if we had read Gibbon," and her mother
replied that they would not have enjoyed Gibbon so much if they had not
seen Rome. Harriett did not really enjoy him; but she enjoyed the sound of
her own voice reading out the great sentences and the rolling Latin names.

She had brought back photographs of the Colosseum and the Forum and of
Botticelli's _Spring_, and a della Robbia Madonna in a shrine of