Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII. The Princess Casamassima

Rowland had a very friendly memory of a little mountain inn, accessible
with moderate trouble from Lucerne, where he had once spent a blissful
ten days. He had at that time been trudging, knapsack on back, over half
Switzerland, and not being, on his legs, a particularly light weight,
it was no shame to him to confess that he was mortally tired. The inn
of which I speak presented striking analogies with a cow-stable; but
in spite of this circumstance, it was crowded with hungry tourists.
It stood in a high, shallow valley, with flower-strewn Alpine meadows
sloping down to it from the base of certain rugged rocks whose outlines
were grotesque against the evening sky. Rowland had seen grander places
in Switzerland that pleased him less, and whenever afterwards he wished
to think of Alpine opportunities at their best, he recalled this grassy
concave among the mountain-tops, and the August days he spent there,
resting deliciously, at his length, in the lee of a sun-warmed boulder,
with the light cool air stirring about his temples, the wafted odors of
the pines in his nostrils, the tinkle of the cattle-bells in his ears,
the vast progression of the mountain shadows before his eyes, and a
volume of Wordsworth in his pocket. His face, on the Swiss hill-sides,
had been scorched to within a shade of the color nowadays called
magenta, and his bed was a pallet in a loft, which he shared with a
German botanist of colossal stature--every inch of him quaking at an
open window. These had been drawbacks to felicity, but Rowland hardly
cared where or how he was lodged, for he spent the livelong day under
the sky, on the crest of a slope that looked at the Jungfrau. He
remembered all this on leaving Florence with his friends, and he
reflected that, as the midseason was over, accommodations would be more
ample, and charges more modest. He communicated with his old friend the
landlord, and, while September was yet young, his companions established
themselves under his guidance in the grassy valley.

He had crossed the Saint Gothard Pass with them, in the same carriage.
During the journey from Florence, and especially during this portion
of it, the cloud that hung over the little party had been almost
dissipated, and they had looked at each other, in the close contiguity
of the train and the posting-carriage, without either accusing or
consoling glances. It was impossible not to enjoy the magnificent
scenery of the Apennines and the Italian Alps, and there was a tacit
agreement among the travelers to abstain from sombre allusions. The
effect of this delicate compact seemed excellent; it ensured them a
week's intellectual sunshine. Roderick sat and gazed out of the window
with a