She had never before known what it was to have her lover

continuously with her. And his aid in those long corridors, where

bambinos smiled down at her with childish lips, helped her

wondrously to understand in so short a time what they sought to

convey to her. Alan was steeped in Italy; he knew and entered into

the spirit of Tuscan art; and now for the first time Herminia found

herself face to face with a thoroughly new subject in which Alan

could be her teacher from the very beginning, as most men are

teachers to the women who depend upon them. This sense of support

and restfulness and clinging was fresh and delightful to her. It

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is a woman's ancestral part to look up to the man; she is happiest

in doing it, and must long remain so; and Herminia was not sorry to

find herself in this so much a woman. She thought it delicious to

roam through the long halls of some great gallery with Alan, and

let him point out to her the pictures he loved best, explain their

peculiar merits, and show the subtle relation in which they stood

to the pictures that went before them and the pictures that came

after them, as well as to the other work of the same master or his

contemporaries. It was even no small joy to her to find that he

knew so much more about art and its message than she did; that she

could look up to his judgment, confide in his opinion, see the

truth of his criticism, profit much by his instruction. So well

did she use those seven short days, indeed, that she came to

Florence with Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, mere names;

and she went away from it feeling that she had made them real

friends and possessions for a life-time.

So the hours whirled fast in those enchanted halls, and Herminia's

soul was enriched by new tastes and new interests. O towers of

fretted stone! O jasper and porphyry! Her very state of health

made her more susceptible than usual to fresh impressions, and drew

Alan at the same time every day into closer union with her. For

was not the young life now quickening within her half his and half

hers, and did it not seem to make the father by reflex nearer and

dearer to her? Surely the child that was nurtured, unborn, on

those marble colonnades and those placid Saint Catherines must draw

in with each pulse of its antenatal nutriment some tincture of

beauty, of freedom, of culture! So Herminia thought to herself as

she lay awake at night and looked out of the window from the

curtains of her bed at the boundless dome and the tall campanile

gleaming white in the moonlight. So we have each of us thought--

especially the mothers in Israel among us--about the unborn babe

that hastens along to its birth with such a radiant halo of the

possible future ever gilding and glorifying its unseen forehead.




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