Chapter 27

CHAPTER XXVII

I may not attempt to report in its fulness our young woman's
response to the deep appeal of Rome, to analyse her feelings as
she trod the pavement of the Forum or to number her pulsations as
she crossed the threshold of Saint Peter's. It is enough to say
that her impression was such as might have been expected of a
person of her freshness and her eagerness. She had always been
fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street
and the atoms of the sunshine. She had an imagination that
kindled at the mention of great deeds, and wherever she turned
some great deed had been acted. These things strongly moved her,
but moved her all inwardly. It seemed to her companions that she
talked less than usual, and Ralph Touchett, when he appeared to
be looking listlessly and awkwardly over her head, was really
dropping on her an intensity of observation. By her own measure
she was very happy; she would even have been willing to take
these hours for the happiest she was ever to know. The sense of
the terrible human past was heavy to her, but that of something
altogether contemporary would suddenly give it wings that it
could wave in the blue. Her consciousness was so mixed that she
scarcely knew where the different parts of it would lead her, and
she went about in a repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing
often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was
there, and yet not seeing many of the items enumerated in her
Murray. Rome, as Ralph said, confessed to the psychological
moment. The herd of reechoing tourists had departed and most of
the solemn places had relapsed into solemnity. The sky was a
blaze of blue, and the plash of the fountains in their mossy
niches had lost its chill and doubled its music. On the corners
of the warm, bright streets one stumbled on bundles of flowers.
Our friends had gone one afternoon--it was the third of their
stay--to look at the latest excavations in the Forum, these
labours having been for some time previous largely extended. They
had descended from the modern street to the level of the Sacred
Way, along which they wandered with a reverence of step which was
not the same on the part of each. Henrietta Stackpole was struck
with the fact that ancient Rome had been paved a good deal like
New York, and even found an analogy between the deep chariot-ruts
traceable in the antique street and the overjangled iron grooves
which express the intensity of American life. The sun had begun
to sink, the air was a golden haze, and the long shadows of
broken column and vague pedestal leaned across the field of ruin.
Henrietta wandered away with Mr. Bantling, whom it was apparently
delightful to her to hear speak of Julius Caesar as a