ADAGIO, sings one of the competing singers in Mozart’s Impresario, and makes something quite pretty out of it, too. But then the Impresario is a very wise man.

From nowhere, but they have an incipiently Italian look, cherubim assemble in vast quantity—for the plush folds of night are rich and heavy—to kick themselves into position with pink rudder toes; the orchestra of dawn chirps up again, now a rooster, now a flute; and with a flumpy heave, aside the curtains go upon the loveliest of painted scenes. The dawn floods up like a chorus from Glück, and there it is, the harmony of the world, wet and dripping, in a tonal net. And there is the great globe itself, the loveliest piece in the Cosmic Opera House, for if it does not contain everything, everything may be seen from there, or from the boxes.

Signor Pomposo, otherwise Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies, enters on a white horse. No matter what the opera, it is always written into his contract that he be allowed to do this. Nobody knows why. Signora del Largo, Maria Carolina herself, in other words the Queen, but no match for the castrati, putters about and beats the scenery. The arrangement is frontal, after Metastasio. Demofoönte steps forward and accosts the Principessa Arethusa, who should be in Syracuse where she belongs, but of that no matter. She is a short, Levantine, bad-tempered creature.

“Who is this woman?”

“I do not know. Perhaps she is hors de Syrie,” replied Sir William, with full orchestra; he never stoops to a pun, but he cannot resist this one.

It is a comedy by Paisiello. It is called Timante, or The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It is not one of the maestro’s better efforts, but it cannot be denied the scenery is superb. Hackert, the King’s painter, always puts in a lot of sky, but then, at Naples there always is a lot of sky, all of it blue, and every shade of blue, for it shifts, it alters, it rustles like a peacock’s tail; at night it has a thousand eyes. The sea, which has no tide to be taken at the flood, though sometimes it turns stormy, is green to purple at the deeps, and celadon elsewhere. It is layered with minnows, though farther out there are San Pietro and even pike, all beautiful, though the taste is muddy.

“Lady Hamilton has been laid up with a fever, and I was obliged to undertake her cure, which I completed in five days,” wrote Sir William once. “Luckily there was a lake close by and I amused myself with catching pike.” The Bay of Naples is very like a lake, and Sir William likes very much to fish. He is, after all, a diplomat. So does the King. He is a glutton.

Sir William has decided that Emma, who has learned manners, must now learn that quite different subject, the manners of the world. That should keep her occupied for some time, since the manners of the world are not seen through in a day.

He has been up since dawn, and is at the moment eating breakfast on his terrace and admiring the view, an unnecessary but pleasant occupation, since the view is already admirable. Dawn, in his case, is an event put ahead to eight o’clock, for though he rises earlier, his time until then is taken up by such chthonic exercises as answering dispatches and dispatching answers, so that he may have the day free for such diplomatic chores as hunting with the King and dining with him afterward; which is something like hunting with the hounds and running with the fox, but necessary. Today, however, is to be different. Today Graffer is to arrive, at last, with plants selected by Sir Joseph. And so is Emma.

*

Graffer has been delayed. To Sir William’s left, Vesuvius rocks like a moored ship, its funnel smoking, a visible symbol of latent industry.

Who could not be happy here?

The answer is, Emma. She has been here four days, and all she does is write to Greville.

That is when he said he would come out.

Nonetheless, she was to have them all. Unlike his nephew, Sir William did not find generosity incompatible with thrift, and to do him justice, was exactly the same, even when he had less money.

“I know, from the small specimen during your absence from London, that I shall have at times many tears to wipe from those charming eyes,” he told Greville. Graffer had arrived. If he had not Emma, he had at least the English garden to divert him.

“I have a very good apartment of 4 rooms, very pleasant-looking to the sea,” wrote Emma. Why would he not answer?

He had not the time. He had turned to commerce and was busy with a scheme to settle a colony of American fishermen at Milford, to carry the whale fishery from thence to the South of Falkland Islands. Americans in those days being a practical people, the fishermen had gone to the Falkland Islands direct, but the scheme was none the worse for that, so it engrossed him and he engrossed it. Let her wait.

*

Emma opened the Triumphs of Temper. A leaf fell out. She had picked it that last afternoon at Edgware Row, but now it was dead. Also, this far south, the Triumphs of Temper did not read well, so she put both away.

It was the fifth day.

On the contrary, she knew exactly what to make of it. It was a siege.

“Mother, help me,” she demanded.

“Daughter, help yourself,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who liked the look and scale of things here, had never liked Greville, and certainly did not care to see her daughter behaving like a willful fool.

“There seems a great deal,” she added kindly, “to help yourself to.” She had two cooks, a housekeeper, three housemaids, an equerry, a butler, a coachman and six tweenies under her already, and since they did not understand her and she could not understand them, the household was functioning smoothly. So long as she kept them down, she might pilfer from the household accounts as she liked.

By God, he was the “heir apearant,” not she. Would she ruin everything?

The thoughts of children on their birthdays are sometimes bitter ones, but at least there were gifts: a carriage fresh-painted, a coachman, a footman, a boat and sea bathing from it, a cashmere shawl, some of Lady Hamilton’s summer jewelry, new muslin dresses and Alençon lace to trim them with. There were concerts at home, and for the first time in two years Sir William had accompaniment for his flute. There were walks in the insect clatter of the Via Reale at night.

The Queen she had not met. No matter what their own morals, queens are not permitted to receive kept women.

There was even a visit to Pompeii.

“Shovel some pretty little trinket in,” said Sir William, “so the girl can grub it out. I want to please her.”

But though he pleased her, he was not Greville. Why did she take that attitude? Did she want to ruin him? Did she not realize she was a gift, a premium upon a signed bond, an anything, but most assuredly not his?

“I won’t, I won’t, I won’t,” said Emma.

“You have a true friend in Sir William,” wrote Greville, months away. “Go to bed.”

“The girl is pretty, stubborn, foolish and desperate,” advised Sir William. “She proposes to return to England to persuade you, and I have thought it best to say that in that event I would pay her passage there.” And in that event …

An inoperative threat, for who was she to make any man marry her? Greville did not reply.

Since he wished not love but complicity, and so was no rival for her affections, Sir William merely handed this epistle to Emma and went to Caserta to inspect the beginnings of the English garden. He now knew the outcome he might expect, but though he had broken horses in his time, this had taken longer and was more difficult and left him as sad.

For the afternoon, he diverted himself with Graffer’s gardening plans; as one passion begins to fail, it is necessary to form another, since the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep eager about something. The moment one is indifferent, on s’ennuie.

This evening, perhaps.

sang Emma, banging away at that latest thing, a pianoforte, which having a hard touch, could most satisfactorily be banged.

“What is that caterwauling?” demanded Mrs. Cadogan, who had heard it three rooms—and what was worse, four servants—away, and did not care for the sound of it.

“It is not caterwauling. It is an impromptu,” said Emma. “I have reached a decision: I have given in.”

It had not been so bad. Besides, afterward he had soothed her when despite herself she had burst into tears. He was almost as good as George. Poor George; these last few months life had been so disturbed, she had not thought to write to him.

“Apart from that, I do not care a fig for Greville!” she shouted.

Mrs. Cadogan had never before seen her in this mood. It was a new mood. She had changed in the night. She was not what formerly she had been. She would now impersonate herself and ape sincerity. From now on not even her mother should know some things.

Undressed, Sir William had looked like a badly peeled banana.

“I shall marry Sir William. Wait and see. I shall be safe. I shall be secure. I shall be untouchable. And I shall have a nephew.”

Mrs. Cadogan, though not regular in her attendance at church, recognized sacrilege when she saw it. “Well, I never,” she snapped. “What an idea!”

“It is not an idea. It is a plan. It is le plan Hamilton!” shouted Emma. “Since it is all he cares about, I shall disinherit him.”

“You could certainly do far worse,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “But you will have to keep your temper.”

She kept her temper.

*

“Delphiniums won’t hardly grow in this soil,” said Graffer. “Neither will ’olly’ocks. And me kids don’t much care for it, either.”

She was indeed wonderful. She did not lose her temper once, not even when tempted to do so by its constant tugging at the leash. Le plan Hamilton took five years.

And had. But the more we do the quicker it ages us, and just as we think we’re catching up with ourselves, we find we’ve lost what we were; we are now only the things we do, and so we grow worldly instead. Though to grow worldly, you must first have entree to it, and that would not be possible until she was married. She had made an agreeable discovery: it is possible to be a tart at night and a silly girl by day, both Thais and niece and a young matron too, for if we no longer care, we may be plural and so all things to all men—except what they really want, and when they get it, throw it away.

*

“You have a lovely voice, my dear,” said Sir William. “We must train it.” He would have said the same thing to a canary.

She went to two retired castrati singing masters. At any rate, they were retired from the stage; to retire from one’s own condition is more difficult. One was called Giuseppe Aprile, the other Giuseppe Millico, but she called them Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They taught her much. Aprile could sound like a bell up to E above the treble stave, and had a warm and sympathetic character.

“In Germany,” he said, for he had been a success in Stuttgart, “rouladen is a kind of rolled meat, but here it is the following.” And he showed her how. He was the jollier of the two, a man of the most impeccable dishonesty. Millico was apt to be dour, for he had sciatica.

“You are an English miss, in which case I suppose it must be Handel,” said Aprile, “but in Italian, please. No, not that way. It is an aristocratic work. Sex is the entertainment of the poor, but it is the recreation of the rich, so toy with it.”

“It is,” added Millico, “considered vulgar to show abandonment or pleasure.”

“Simulate, but never feel. It is the only way to achieve a pure tone,” said Aprile.

“My child,” said Millico, his eyes glistening with tears, “you are a very beautiful woman. And besides, you do not sing so very bad. Almost as good as Monticelli,” he added, naming the singer he hated most.

“That on the wall?” asked Aprile. “It is a Caravaggio. And no, I cannot tell you which sex it is. Indeed, which sex it is would be difficult to determine.”

“I only asked to know.”

“Dear lady, we can never know. In this life, nothing is certain.”

Since she had no curiosity, nothing ever impressed her as being odd. By and large, she took it as it was, because it was there. But all the same, they were funny gentlemen; they cheered her up.

*

So did the painters.

Though by no means a snob, in fact, not a snob at all, Sir William, far from holding the mirror up to nature, held Nature up to the Mirror, to see what it was like. So painters were in spate. Sir William Beechey drew her, very badly. Cousin Gavin, whose forte was ancient Romans, made the attempt and failed. Marchant cut her head in cameo, for a finger ring. One man worked in wax, another in clay. The King’s tame Germans did their level best, with somewhat flat results. A Mr. Hudson painted her for the lid of a snuffbox. There were so many of them that a room was set aside for their use. Emma sat on a dais, both to watch and to pose. It was exhilarating to see herself set forth in so many forms, but she missed George.

If all other entertainment failed, there was always the King, the Queen, the Opera and Vesuvius, each with a separate establishment. Sir William was interested in all four of these diversions: the King, professionally; the Queen, if needs be; the Opera, when unavoidable; and Vesuvius for recreation.

Vesuvius was in eruption, a sight not to be missed. They went by carriage to Portici; from there they would proceed by ass.

The carriage rolled along the waterfront where there was a crowd in the midst of which a tall, sulky, big-nosed, pasty-faced, dribbly lipped man was keening away like an auctioneer.

“Whatever is he doing?” asked Emma.

“It is the King,” said Sir William, and waved. “He is selling fish. It is his hobby to sell fish. It is quite harmless, for he always gives them their money back afterward.”

The crowd roared, and obligingly the King tossed it a fish.

“And what does the Queen do?”

“The Queen,” said Sir William, “is more difficult, if less fatiguing. She plots.”

The carriage rolled on. Sir William was nervous, for he had not shared his volcano with a woman before. Vesuvius was his hobby, and a hobby is a spiritual exercise, a selfless activity. Vesuvius was his answer to himself. Whenever he climbed it, he felt justified, even if he did need a guide to help him over the rough spots. That did not bother him; if we are really intelligent in this life, we always need a guide, for the guide is a limited being, so we make use of what he knows, intensively, to extend our own general sense of well-being. There is a purely physical wisdom in this world which the wise have not, for wisdom is disembodied, and so, if they are wise, they hire it.

None of which he could explain to Emma, but from Emma he wanted only a beauteous enthusiasm. He had long ago discovered the giddy freedom of saying witty things to a pretty woman who cannot understand them; at most they catch the shimmer and the hook, but never the joy of trawling in the void, so you may be as philosophical as you wish, with impunity.

At Portici they left the carriage and clambered aboard the donkeys—gray velvet creatures all rubbed the wrong way—while two miles off, the lava steamed like the world on the last day. Emma, who had once, as a child, worked with pit ponies, was reminded of that, but did not say so. They began to climb.

The night came on, cool from the sea, but warm from the volcano. Out to sea the islands seemed to move about as the air shifted in temperature, and the lights of fishing boats flared up like hissing embers. The lava flow, which had been all steam, was now all light.

At a hermitage halfway up the mountain they stopped to drink the local wine, ashy, resinous and bitter as the best Burgundy. The hermitage had a terrace from which one could admire a cascade of fire falling down a precipice, like a basilisk fleeing up a chimney, incandescent in its element. As the hot stuff fell it set fire to trees and brushwood, every one a burning bush, every one an Isaac.

Emma was properly enraptured. “I could stay all night,” she said. “I shall never be in charity with the moon again, for it looks so pale and sickly; and it is the lava that lights up the moon, for the moon is nothing to the lava.”

Sir William was touched. He had come merely to show off an enthusiasm; he had not hoped to share it.

The lava parted around a hermit’s hut and usurped a chapel, icons or no. It was most Protestant lava, for there are no religious preservatives against the fury of nature; the fury of nature is in itself the preservative. A badly painted madonna bobbled on the surface, hissed, bubbled, cracked, burst into flame and was sucked under.

Emma, in white and with her hair unbound, flitted gracefully on the balcony. “If I had a tambourine, I would dance!” she cried.

The hired help was touched. He was a Milord. She was, if not Milady, something less solemn and more vulnerable, the favorite of the hour.

“Why must we go so soon?” asked Emma. “Sir William, you must bring me again.”

Sir William was moved. His wife had been a mousy creature, but now she was a dead mouse, and one must not speak ill of the dead. But she had never liked Vesuvius in this way, and never looked so intangible by moonlight as did Emma, dancing.

On the way down they met a company which had not dared to climb so far as they. The silly cowards. It made her laugh.

*

Sir William had his oddities. That could not be denied. She did not care for some of them.

Standing in one of the drawing rooms was an upright open chest. It sparkled in the candlelight, for it was rimmed with gold, though its interior was black as pitch.

“It is from Pompeii,” said Sir William, and sent the servants away. This was a moment he had arranged for himself.

“Stand in it, my dear.”

She did not want to. She was afraid to face the dark. She backed into it, and it fitted her exactly. The wood was old and smelled of earth, potato bugs and the root cellar.

He opened a casket and took out a necklace and a pair of earrings and told her to put them on. She put them on. He told her to raise her right hand to her throat. She raised her right hand to her throat. Lifting up a candelabrum, he held it over his head so that the light played over her. Since the windows were open, the light flickered. She closed her eyes.

“That was how they found her,” he said.

“Found who?”

“Fulvia Octavia Porsena,” he said. “It was an old Etruscan family. When the air touched her, she fell to dust.” He moved around to the other side, the flames of the candles darting after their wicks in the sudden draft. “That is her jewelry. It was found with her. She, too, was beautiful.”

“Sir William,” she said. “I feel cold.”

“You may keep the jewels. They suit you to perfection.” Seeing she was frightened, he hesitated, and then added, “Emma …”

“Yes?”

“In privacy it does not matter. Say ‘William,’ if you will,” he said. And with the sad smile of someone who cannot quite touch anything but is moved all the same, he added, “Thank you, my dear. Since you are yourself so beautiful, you must allow me the beauty of my whims.”

He then went off to arrange a treaty so that in exchange for hides, beef, tin, lead, copper and textiles—of which she had plenty—England might receive figs, licorice, goatskins, sulphur, salt, marble, almonds, currants and raisins, which she would not know what to do with, though the salt would be useful to preserve the beef, and no pudding was ever the poorer for a raisin or two.

She wrote him love letters, in her new, worldly style, while he was away. “I am a pretty woman, and one can’t be everything else, but now I have my wisdom teeth, I will try to be ansome and reasonable.”

But wisdom teeth ache like the devil coming in.

Mrs. Cadogan was amiable. “A gentleman of his age, you cannot expect the world for breakfast.”

“I shall get it served again in the evening, hotted up, if I don’t eat it now,” said Emma.

“To think my Emma would want diversion.”

“Well, the more interesting the world is, the more bored you get,” said Emma, who was learning. “Which language do we study next?”

It was quite remarkable, her aptitude for languages. A philologist might have been slowed down by interest, but not she. Words were like money—a series of counters with which you got what you wanted—and varied from country to country, like the coinage. These were blue, these were yellow, these were transparent, like beads. You strung them into sentences and with them bartered for company, conversation, a new shawl, the gossip of the day. Italian, French, a smattering of German—it was all the same to her.

*

“Sir William’s mistress is an interesting woman, is she not?” asked the Queen.

“Interesting to look at,” said the Spanish Ambassadress.

“It is all, I assure you, that I wish to do. Tell the Ambassador I shall call on him. If I am curious about her, think how infinitely more curious she must be about me.” And with some complacency, Maria Carolina displayed her skirt.

*

“Sir William was up early this morning,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

“He did the necessary and then he left.”

But Emma was in an excellent mood. Things were coming on.

*

Sir William took her to the opera. “There they are,” he said, pointing to the Royal Box.

Emma was disappointed. The King looked like a Nesselrode pudding well enforced with lady-finger fat, his cherry slipped down to make his mouth, his face a mass of imperfectly whipped cream. Maria Carolina, made maternal less by childbearing than by some glandular imbalance, was a regal, overdressed, portable shriek. The sons had the waiting look of heirs; the daughters the desperate one of unmatched heiresses. The Queen belonged to the age of intermarriage, not diplomatic relations, and regarded her subjects stolidly. Ferdinand smiled, waved, and did other things.

“‘He gropes his breeches with a monarch’s air,’” said Sir William. “That’s Johnson. We shall watch the stage instead. It will be more seemly.”

Sir William, who was fond of music and so did not much care for opera, confronted the stage. Virtuosity did not appeal to him; he preferred his own flute and someone to play continuo. If we are to rise above ourselves, someone must play continuo, though now it seemed to be he who played it, for Emma was beginning to find vanity in art, though thank God she was not yet swollen to the proportions of signora Brigida Bandi, the eminent contralto. Hers was still a modest drawing-room vanity, and may it remain that way.

The orchestra was drowned out by a volley of trumpets. A gentleman suddenly galloped down out of the wings on a white barb fourteen hands high, the plumes on his helmet three feet tall. He drew rein beside the soprano, also, alas, beside the chandelier. The plumes caught fire and burned down to his helmet, but he was a professional. The show must go on; he ignored the conflagration. “Mia speranza, io pur vorrei,” he sang, though his visor had stuck.

“But I thought the opera was Romulus,” said Emma.

“So it is, but that’s Marchesi. Both the horse and the aria are written into his contract, otherwise he will not sing.”

With an angry glance at the chandelier, Marchesi cast his helmet aside, and taking out his snuffbox, walked to the footlights. He was wearing oxtongue shoes with paste buckles, flowered stockings, green knee britches and a cuirass. At the rear of the stage, the soprano crossed to her mother, who was seated there, to use a gargle and a looking glass. The swill was deposited in a tumbler.

“Fire the cannon‚” said Marchesi, and disappeared. The cannon were fired. The auditorium filled with smoke. The King looked apprehensive.

From backstage came sounds of celebration, and on marched the chorus, pulling a chariot, preceded by lictors and followed by the people. The supers carried ancestral portraits, each looking like Marchesi. In the chariot, Marchesi, with a new set of plumes, his hands and feet shackled and chained, raised his arms with a rattle and burst passionately forth into a paean of joy.

“But I thought this was the triumph of Romulus?”

“And so it is, my dear.”

“Why then the chains? Is it perversion or vice?”

“It is neither. These people love a mad scene, a sacrifice or a scene in chains. They have not the polish to deal with ordinary things, so they put drama where drama is not. Hence the chains.”

Marchesi clanked and rattled away and went on as maddeningly as a water closet with an interminable run. You wanted to jiggle him.

“As you see,” said Sir William, “Opera has much to teach.”

*

At Posilipo there was a late evening party with torches in the shrubbery, garlands on the herms, and a regatta. The King went by in a barge, as tall as Caligula, accompanied by a solemn music—or at any rate, Neapolitan boat songs—but he was much too fat to recline properly. He was not too fat to chase a woman. With a painful alacrity, he turned his torso and ogled her with his vast yellow bloodshot eyes. The passage of his barge set their own wherry awash.

“Tell milady I am only sorry I cannot speak English,” he said.

“Indeed,” said Emma, “it is a blessing he cannot.”

“Lovely like marble, but like marble, a cold race,” said the King, who was merely habitually acquisitive and had meant no harm.

*

“I have not wrote this ten days as we have been on a visit to the Countess Mahoney at Ische 9 days and are just returned from their,” Emma informed Greville. They had gone in a hired galley, in stable weather, with a harpsichord on deck, a semicircle of musicians, and the Countess down to the shore to meet them. “Though I was in undress, onely having on a muslin chemise very thin, yet the admiration I met with was surprising.”

Like many almost sexless creatures, Emma was attractive to women of a certain taste. It made her life much smoother, since they never told her why. Ischia was a volcano once, too.

“When we came awhay the Countess cried & I am setting for a picture for her in a turkish dress, very pretty.” She enjoyed writing to Greville these days. It is not given to every woman to love two generations of the same man, and, to tell the truth, she now preferred him in the older version. In London, she had been locked away in a box; here she sat in one.

“There has been a Prince paying us a visit. He is sixty years of age, one of the first families here, and as allways lived at Naples & when I told him I had been to Caprea he asked me if I went their by land; onely think what ignorance. I staired at him and asked who was his tutor.”

*

At Caserta, the English garden was not going well.

“The Queen has dropped it,” said Graffer, “and what is worse, His Majesty has taken it up. He wants a maze. I am a gardener, not an antiquarian. There has been no maze in England since Fair Rosamund’s bow-er.”

“You could make a little one of box,” said Sir William.

“Box grows slowly. By the time the box is up, we’ll be down to his grandson, at the earliest. He wants it now. It’s one of his pranks; to confuse the courtiers, he says. I’ll not please his pranks, for he’s no king to me.”

Sir William had one of his happier solutions.

“Lay it out as a knot garden, tell him it will grow, and once he’s forgotten it, you can dig it up again and turf it over,” he said.

*

Notions are one thing. Any woman can have notions, but it is harder to be visited by an idea. Nonetheless, Emma had just received one.

She was sitting in Sir William’s gallery of statues, surrounded by Castor, Pollux, a dubious Vespasian, a Mourning Woman, a Crouching Venus (it was a pair), a Hellenistic Prince in gilt bronze, and two Senators, one of them lacking a head. She felt rebellious. What did he see in them anyway? And he moved her about as though she were an art object. Very well then. She would be an art object.

Getting up, she rang for a shawl and a full-length mirror. Then she arranged herself, a Crouching Venus first, then the Mourning Woman. She was reminded of George. What with George and the Opera and a dash of mythology besides, she found that Grief, Joy, Surprise, Awakened Conscience, Noble Resignation, An Orphan’s Curse, Herself Surprised, they came quite easily; they were easy to do, so long as you watched the mirror. A portrait was all very well, but a mirror was better.

For Cornelia, however, she would need two children. It was Sir William’s birthday. This was to be her surprise.

*

Sir William galloped home from Caserta, past the poorhouse. It was a very long poorhouse, for Naples was a very large town, and though the King was generous, he could not be generous every day, so the rest of the time there was precious little to do but spend money and corrupt the taxgatherer.

As sometimes happened in the evening, Sir William did not feel so immortal as was his wont. No doubt on their birthdays the Gods occasionally feel the same way, conscious perhaps of Christianity in the future, waiting patiently, with an undertaker’s air.

A great many things could be counted in Sir William’s head at any given moment, for though he was not restless, his thoughts were often so. Ideas to him were like fruit: one does not grow them oneself; one merely touches them to see if they are ripe, before plucking them. Did a horse ever take all of its feet off the ground at one time? Would there be a war, and if so, with whom? At any rate it would not affect them: they were too far south. What about the English garden? It would have to be finished; it was a matter of national prestige. If Oliver Cromwell could have his portrait behind a door in the Pitti Palace, surely His Britannic Majesty might be allowed to plant a garden here. What was to be done about Greville? It seemed he could succeed at nothing unless it hung on Sir William’s affairs. At what age did a healthy man have his first heart attack? No doubt she was sometimes shrill, but she was a grateful creature, and at least she was always there when one came back. Since she never asked for anything, it was a pleasure to give her gifts. She had natural breeding and referred to him by his first name only when taken unaware.

*

At dinner she seemed nervous. Afterward she excused herself. He kept his birthday privately, but even so, that was unlike her. He took coffee in the large salon, where the sculpture was. It was bitter coffee. He let it stand. When he heard a rustle, he paid no mind to it, for it was only the evening shadows closing in.

“Who’s there?” he asked, catching another sound. It was a footman, squeaking across the parquet with a candelabrum, to open the gold-and-white doors leading to a farther room.

In the darkness beyond the doors the candelabrum caught a weaving figure in long Roman garments, gathering flowers in a meadow. The walls were blue. Space was blue. In the Elysian Fields one sees a good deal of blue. The flowers were yellow. So was the dress. The figure looked this way and that, now stooping, now plucking, and in the candlelight, space seemed infinite. It was like that scene in Swift, at Glubbdubdrib, where the past is shown, too real to be touched.

“William, is it not that fresco we saw underground at Herculaneum, to the life?”

Sir William dropped his coffee cup. He had been dreaming.

“Don’t be cross. Perhaps I have not got it quite right yet, but there are more.”

There were more. It was the beginning of what were to be called her Attitudes. He was entranced. It was not so much that she moved, as that she was so moving. She could make the past move.

“No, not quite that way,” he said, dismissing the footman, and from then on it was he who held the candelabrum up.

*

“My dear, Herr Goethe is coming. He is a great man. And though I know that concept to be repugnant to the female temperament, yet to men such do exist, so entertain him. We will do the Attitudes.”

The Attitudes had become famous.

*

He was a great man. He was almost as good as Kotzebue, and had written a novel sufficiently illusory to make women cry. There was the added advantage that when he traveled he left his native language, that is most of it, at home, and spoke French. He was not alone. Some people, in moments of self-doubt, produce a mirror; Goethe produced Tischbein, a young artist brought along to sketch the Master when told to. Goethe, so they said, had a universal mind, and if he found that restricting, did not show it. He was no more frightening than any other young man of good family.

Though without affectation, he was not without mannerisms and had a tendency to sit about in rooms as modestly as a public statue patiently waiting to be unveiled, and when he spoke, spoke as a priest does through the mouth of the oracle. Sir William could not help but notice that his chair was an exact two inches in front of Tischbein’s chair, no matter where they might find themselves.

Sir William was amused. Like all well-bred people, he demanded of others only that they play their role. If they asked you backstage, he did not like it. He clouded up at once. But since Goethe could be seen only from out front, he found him, though German and hence irrelevant, congenial.

Emma was up to her star turn.

So this is hate, she realized, with some surprise (it was a Medea). It is certainly a most sustaining emotion, I had forgotten it; but, afraid to linger, hurried on to a Psyche Abandoned (after Thorwaldsen). It was marvelous really. The emotions could be not only shown but felt, merely with the aid of two shawls, a chair, a candle and an urn. It was possible to express them all; Sir William had shown her how. For Joy, however, one needed a tambourine (with fitments from Pompeii. Joy was authentic, though the wood hoop itself was new).

“Schöne,” said Goethe.

“Schöne,” said Tischbein, though he did not altogether approve, for in Winckelmann he had read that Expression is an unfortunate necessity which arises from the fact that human beings are always in some emotional state, and Tischbein, who was a learned painter, had found this to be true from his own experience, and not only true, but deplorable.

“Wunderschöne,” said Goethe sharply.

“Wunderschöne,” repeated Tischbein.

As the two men said it, they seemed to bend over invisible oars, while behind them the minor members of the Neapolitan German colony followed them (the oars were locked) in expressing admiration with the same most audible hiss, in unison. Vogue la galère.

There are geese in the Forum, thought Sir William. They will rouse the guard. And so Rome cannot be taken, after all; the relevant anecdote may be found, with some labor, in Livy.

Emma was up to Lucretia now, in the opulent manner of Giulio Romano, also to be found in Livy, with a bare bodkin. Goethe admired, though what he remembered was a large portfolio he had seen recently in which the physiognomy of the horse, by means of the eyes mostly, was utilized to show the entire range of the emotions, from Startled Joy to Woe. Ox-eyed Juno is one thing, but the English are noted for their addiction to and emulation of the horse.

“Tischbein, is it not so?”

“Ja,” said Tischbein, without listening. He was a paid companion. It was always so, though later he hoped to have disciples of his own.

Emma was beginning to tire, but Vivacity came next, so she was not worried. She was enjoying herself. There was so much to feel—whole continents of emotion of whose existence she had been ignorant. She beckoned to the footman. It was time to bring the children in, for she planned to conclude with a Cornelia and Her Jewels, to be followed by a Hope, a 19th century emotion perhaps, but then, artists are always a generation ahead of their time.

“Standing, kneeling, seated, reclining, grave, sad, sportive, teasing, abandoned, penitent, alluring, threatening, agonized … one manifestation follows another, and indeed grows out of it,” said Goethe. For that is the way life is: one thing leads to another. We need merely follow, being careful only that of any two roads, we take the right one, lest we be left. “Her elderly knight holds the torch for her performance and is absorbed in his mind’s desire,” he added.

Perhaps he was, at that. For Sir William had never been given to the passions; he was cerebral. At any rate, he would not have mentioned them, for English is the language of the affections, not of the passions. Anything else fortunately remains a lexicographical impossibility.

Nonetheless, it was true; it was his mind’s desire.

After the performance, he took Goethe down to the cellars. The lantern made little holes of light in the surrounding darkness. Bronzes, bustos, and sarcophagi cast muddled silhouettes against the ceiling and the walls. Standing in the middle of the floor was a chest with a gold rim, upended.

“She stood there once,” said Sir William, “in a Pompeiian dress. The effect was striking.”

Goethe stared at the chest. It looked very like Pandora’s box, without the lid. Hope, no doubt, was fluttering about upstairs, or else waiting quietly in her bed, her wings invisible, a hope realized.

Had Sir William been a fellow German, Goethe would have said, “You are to be congratulated, sir.”

Had he been English, and therefore truly clubbable, Sir William might perhaps have permitted him to say so.

As it was, with a last look at the chest, which was a shrine of some kind, the two men went back upstairs, sobered by the thought that under different circumstances they might each have found somebody they could talk to, at last.

*

Emma’s letters were too long, so Greville did not read them. In order to have our letters read, we must insert in them something the lector wishes to know, and there was no longer anything about Emma that Greville wished to know. But he answered them because in that way he could bring things to Sir William’s attention indirectly. She should be a go-between. He had found her proper use.

He was concerned with the improvement of Milford Haven. Instead of taking money out, Sir William should put money in.

The man is ungrateful. I am only acting in his best interest, thought Greville, had the Act of Parliament passed anyway (it would allow him to pour money into Milford Haven Harbor), and drew a draft upon his uncle’s bankers, which he cashed with some pleasure.

*

At an official reception to which all the world and his wife came, Emma could not appear. Like a child, she was to be allowed downstairs only in the presence of the more indulgent members of the family. And since she was a child, she did not relish that.

The King and Queen were to make a call, much as they would have gone to the bank, for such was the political situation that England seemed their one security.

Since formal calls can scarcely be made impromptu, Emma had already seen the carpet rolled out to the street, and was well aware of an anticipatory bustle among the chambermaids and footmen. So when, at her singing lesson (she had put back the regular hour), she heard coach horns in the street and the clatter of a stage carriage, a natural curiosity impelled her—forgetful that she was not to be seen—to the landing at the top of the main hall, to see who it could be. The clustered columns of the landing made her indiscretion discreet without in any way concealing her.

Below her Sir William was receiving first the King, then the Queen.

“Caro cavaliere!” yelled the King. Since he refused to speak anything but Italian, and the Queen—except for an occasional guttural curse—restricted herself to French, the conversation had a worldly air.

“There are disturbances,” said the Queen, “in France.” To entertain royalty is not easy, for their attention tends to wander. Maria Carolina’s wandered.

Looking down, Emma saw a massy woman of about forty, with a long face, lovely arms, and a poached look about the eyes. In one hand she held a long white glove negligently, as Pharaoh would hold a gold-and-lapis flail, the symbol of his office, though to use it, you flick the power itself, not its embodiment.

Looking up, the Queen saw a mobile creature who had the look of someone worth knowing, were she but knowable.

Sir William followed her glance. Emma ducked out of sight. The Queen and Sir William progressed to the salon, where they talked of France, to an obbligato from Ferdinand, who never talked of anything but hunting. He did not mean to be discordant, but having no other subject, he played always the same tune.

They stayed an hour.

“So that is Miss Hart,” said the Queen, leaving. “I should like to talk to her. It is a pity I cannot.” She needed a new confidante, for a new favorite is cheaper than an old one, if only because accounts have not been struck yet, and besides, she has the unique merit no old favorite can have, of being new.

Their carriage rolled sonorously away (because of the horns). Sir William went upstairs, where Emma was at her singing again.

“My dear child,” he said, noticing she was flushed. “You must never look down on royalty. They are not designed to be seen from above. It is they who belong on the balcony, not you.”

“Indeed I meant no harm,” said Emma carefully, but with a forgive-me look. It was a new attitude.

“I’m sure you didn’t.” She was a little minx. She was a most amusing creature.

*

At dawn, when he could get away, Sir William went out to fish in the bay alone, in a longboat. That is, he had two boys row him out, sent them back in the dory, and told them to return when he should wave.

Hot sun is good for old bones, and he was fifty-nine. However, since each good comes accompanied by its own evil, he had come prepared, and wore a large, floppy, disreputable hat.

He got nary a nibble, but there is a truth locked up in every platitude—crisp as an almond none the worse for a frazzled shell—and one does not go fishing to catch fish.

The hobby is praised in Theophrastus, who also informs us that love is the passion of an idle mind, as no doubt it is. But Sir William did not have an idle mind. At most, he allowed it to idle at times in order to let it rest. Theophrastus further quotes the tragic poet Charaemon to the effect that Eros is variable, like wine; that when he comes in moderation, he is gracious, but when he comes too intensely and puts men in utter confusion, he is hard to bear.

Passion is ludicrous and vulgar (here there was a bite, but it turned out to be an orange grown drowsy with its own weight). To the English, vulgarity is an all-embracing concept that includes all living matter and most inanimate, with the exception only of themselves. Sir William did not except himself. He was quite willing to laugh at his own passions, given he might do so reminiscently (here he threw the orange at a pelican, who did not want it either).

“It is usually agreeable, all the same, to have her here,” said Sir William, himself a downy old bird, as becomes a diplomat. “I shall do nothing, but if she does, I shall not interfere.” And he went on fishing for no fish, contentedly.

*

North of Brescia, Goethe confronted the foothills with equanimity. They looked at him. He looked at them. Then, twisting in the saddle, he turned his face upward, for a last dose of the sun, and rode on with relief. It is necessary to make the Grand Tour, no doubt, but he was not sorry to be going home. He had gathered his impressions and made, on the whole, an excellent one on his late hosts. It was time to create.

Nonetheless, when the shadows began to fall and he drew rein for the night at Como, he found to his annoyance that he was humming “Mein’ junges leben hat’ ein End’,” so he stopped. It was an old German pietistic parlor song from past time, written by the Norns.

Kennst du das land….

*

“You are growing up, my child,” said Mrs. Cadogan, doing Emma’s hair, which gave her pleasure. It was such an occupation as Fafnir would have enjoyed. It was like carding red gold. “Pray why?”

“It cannot be helped.”

“Of course it can be helped. It is certainly no reason to ruin your appearance.”

*

“No,” said Sir William, still out at sea. “It cannot be helped. But all the same it is a great shame.”

He was almost aware, these days, of the drawing about him of an invisible net. It was a silken net. Since he had tarried too long, he found himself being rowed to shore through the fishing fleet, which was putting to sea to cast out theirs.

It was New Year’s Eve of 1789; and then, just as suddenly, of 1790.

*

In 1789, there was a gala at Ranelagh, to celebrate the recovery from madness of His Most Gracious Majesty George III. That was how he solved his problems. When he became bored, he went away. When his interest was aroused again, he came back, to find everything much the same, except for the increasing difficulty each time of getting back. The orchestra played “Rule Britannia” (by the author of “Sally in Our Alley”) and the national anthem. We can all recover from madness in time; here was proof. At Posilipo, Sir William gave a dinner to celebrate the same event.

There was an earthquake in Calabria. Angelica Kauffmann painted Emma as the Comic Muse. Sir John Acton became the Neapolitan Prime Minister.

“Sir John Acton,” Sir William explained, “is a man of great character, most of it bad. But though of an émigré family, he is an Englishman. He is competent, which is the next best thing to ability, and far rarer. He plans to reorganize the fleet.”

Ferdinand assisted at the birth of a new age by founding a silk factory. There was a revolution in France, and refugees began to arrive, among them Madame Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, who painted Emma, not very well.

Torn from her native Paris (it had seemed prudent to remove—she had no taste for painting commoners), Madame Lebrun did not care for much of anything. Indeed, even at home she had sometimes felt much the same way. She drew Emma as a bacchante. “As a bacchante,” she said tartly, “she is perfect.” The Queen, whom she also drew, did not speak quite flawless French, but was at least noble. Breeding counts. These things show, no matter what we do.

*

Emma decided to hurry things a little. Opposite her, Sir William was peeling a banana. She giggled reminiscently. Dressed and undressed, they are so different, which provides a key, but a key to a midnight lock only. To come and go freely by day, you need a skeleton key, and for this the best procedure is to take that wax impression called gossip, the one all-purpose key for all social occasions. The time and tide had come. It was to be taken at the flood.

It was indeed a flood. It beached the most amazing mail—for the net was now visible—in handwriting which ranged from the flaccid to an angry scrawl knotted with rage.

*

His family heard the gossip first, which is to say his uncles, cousins and aunts. There were several disapproving screeds from his favorite niece Mrs. Dickenson, Mary Hamilton that was. What did this talk signify? Did he mean to disgrace them all? Let him disavow the rumor at once.

“I am sorry,” said Sir William. “She is necessary to my happiness, and the handsomest, loveliest, cleverest and best creature in the world.”

“I confess I doat on him,” wrote Emma to England, feeding the flames. “Nor I never can love any other person but him.” She was not lying. She believed it.

As for the gossip, that was another thing. “I fear,” wrote Sir William, dipping his pen in cold water, to douse them, “that her views are beyond what I can bring myself to execute, and that when her hopes on this point are over she will make herself and me unhappy. Hitherto her conduct is irreproachable.”

“It is said he has married her,” said Towneley.

“I was most happy to hear that he was not married,” wrote Heneage Legge, a friend of Greville’s then passing through Naples, a man with a modest talent for social espionage. “However, he flung out some hints of doing justice to her good behaviour, if his public situation did not forbid him to consider himself an independent man. She gives everybody to understand that he is now going to England to solicit the King’s consent to marry her. She is much visited here by ladies of the highest rank, but wants a little refinement of manners.”

“You need not be afraid for me in England. We come for a short time, to take our last leave,” Emma informed Greville.

“They say they shall be in London by the latter end of May,” wrote Legge.

The Duchess of Argyll, a relative by marriage, her first husband having been a Hamilton—the woman Emma had watched leaving George’s door—had come to Naples. She was one of the Gunning sisters, who had gone to London years before to make a good match, and besides, the Anglo-Irish are not so strict in particulars as their English cousins.

“After all, William,” she said, “why not? She’s a likable creature, she does very well here, and we are not there.”

Unfortunately the Duchess of Argyll died.

“You may think of my afflictions when I heard of the Duchess of Argyll’s death. I never had such a friend as her, and that you will know, when I see you,” Emma wrote Greville.

“Was I in a private station,” Sir William told Sir Joseph—that eminent botanist having asked, like everybody else—“I should have no objection that Emma should share with me le petit bout de vie qui me reste under the solemn convenant yon allude to. I have more fairly delivered you my confession than is usually done in this country, of which you may make any use you please. Those who ask out of mere curiosity, I would wish to remain in the dark.”

In chains, on very thin gruel, preferably. It was the devil of a business, and how had it grown up round him so suddenly?

“I shall allways esteem you for your relationship to Sir William, and having been the means of my knowing him,” Emma wrote Greville, with what was quite a pretty wit, though veiled.

As a countermove, Mr. Legge persuaded Mrs. Legge to cut Emma dead, and sent the good news to Greville at once. (Now that the Duchess of Argyll was no more, the social maneuvers of Mrs. Legge might be assumed to loom large.)

Greville was gratified. “Mrs. L. has done the right thing,” he said.

“No doubt she has, but it does not seem to have been enough to raise her from the obscurity of middle-class life,” said Towneley. “Pray, who is Mrs. L.?”

“Mrs. Legge, of course.”

Towneley did not ask who Mr. Legge was. To establish his credentials, he felt sure, would have meant a rummage at least three generations back, and he had not the time.

The wife of the Spanish Ambassador paid a public call at the British Embassy, with as many contessas as she could assemble. Honor was at stake, and nobody much liked the British colony anyway, except for Sir William, of course, who was a dear.

“I was staggered to hear them speak always in the plural, as we, us and ours,” wrote Legge.

The Bishop of Derry, who was in Ireland for one of his rare ecclesiastical visitations, asked them to come there for a breather if they found the English air too thin. “Take her as anything but Mrs. Hart, and she is a superior being,” he said privately. “As for herself, she is always vulgar.” But he meant to back them up.

“As I have experienced that of all women in the world, the English are the most difficult to deal with abroad,” wrote Sir William to his niece Mary, “I fear eternal tracasseries, was she to be placed above them here, and which must be the case, as a Minister’s wife in every country takes place of every rank of nobility.”

He was thinking it over.

Like all expatriates, Sir William found it necessary to go home from time to time, in order to re-establish the validity of his reasons for staying away. And Greville was making a mash of the Welsh estates. So since they were now inseparable, they both went.

*

“Are you going to marry her?” demanded Sir William’s sister-in-law, point blank.

“As a public character at Naples, I do not think it right to marry Mrs. Hart—from respect to my King.”

His sister-in-law gave him a sensible-matron look. They had known each other too long for that sort of evasion. “Very proper. But I hope you think there is something owing to yourself.”

“As to that, the first object is to be happy.”

“It is,” said his sister-in-law, “not.” She had never before heard a doctrine so shocking.

Mary Dickenson, having met Emma, felt otherwise.

“I have always liked what you have written on a certain delicate subject, and you and I think very much alike,” said Sir William gratefully.

*

Emma had not much cared for the look of the cliffs at Dover. Like the English temperament, they may not be pure white, but they look white, and they have a cold and decided hauteur which does not welcome the invader. In Italy, she was what she was. Here she was only what she had come from. And besides, Italy was warmer.

Sir William was annoyed. “Why should I not please her? She has pleased me. Besides, I do not exist solely that Charles may have his inheritance. That does not seem to have occurred to him.”

Indeed it had not. For to Charles, everything in this world must have its reason, and in this matter he saw none.

“She does not know,” said Mary Dickenson, who had asked Sir William and Emma to the country for the weekend, but spoke mostly to her uncle.

“Doesn’t know what?”

“Anything. She is innocent. But there is hope. Her left hand has been busy recently, and when it needs help, I suppose the right will have to know. So why not ask for it, when the time comes, and see?”

“Mary!”

“Why not? It is what you want to do, whether you know it or not. And I must confess that when I think how much it will displease Cousin Charles, I almost condone it.”

In the young, impatience is merely anticipation; in the old, the knowledge that there is not much time left; in the world, both. But having enunciated this apothegm, Sir William found himself unwilling to be hustled along, though it was late to tarry. The first is done for us, and the second by us. Perhaps he merely wished to retain for as long as possible the illusion of choice.

*

“I hope,” said Mary’s husband to Emma, “that Sir William will find Emma and Lady H. the same.” For Mary’s husband was no fool either.

*

“I am very glad you have seen Sir W. Hamilton comfortably and had time for conversation, tho’ probably the Lady was in the way,” said Lady Frances Harper in a loud, shrill voice. “I believe it likely she may be our aunt. My mother seemed to fear it. Do you think it likely? I own I think not; for making a shew of her Graces and Person to all his acquaintance in Town does not appear a preliminary for marriage.”

Whatever else one may say for it, this is not the tone in which one dissuades a distinguished, independent and famous relative from doing as he pleases.

*

Emma had gone off to see Romney, who felt less delighted than he had hoped to. She was not quite the same Emma, that was why.

The English lack—their culture is based upon its absence—the bump of admiration. But she was the latest sensation, which is something else again. A sensation is permitted to wax warm, for it will pass. Her attitudes were unique. Her contralto was the correct oratorio rumble and left the stemware intact. The secret of her success was in request.

“A particular friend of mine,” wrote Sir Thomas Lawrence, “promised to get me introduced to Sir. W. H.’s to see this wonderful woman you have doubtless heard of—Mrs. Hart.” He had been in London five years earlier when she was there, but apparently he had not heard of her then, or if he had, had not listened, the name then being as hard to catch as it was now impossible not to drop.

“George, you may paint me as ‘The Ambassadress,’” said Emma, and preened.

“I expect Sir Thomas will be doing that.” The only thing a really creative person has to teach is himself, and she had outgrown him; although it was very gratifying to have her call, and he would do the portrait, of course.

“However did you guess? He has particularly demanded to take my likeness next week.”

Lawrence, using an old canvas, daubed her in over an allegory of Liberality guided by Sagacity, a work by Reynolds. He was not without a sense of humor, and as he had supplanted Reynolds in other things, why not in this, as well?

“Her acting was simple, grand, terrible and pathetic,” said Romney. But why, oh why must she act now, here in the studio, where once they had been content to play?

Or maybe she could no longer help it.

*

Even Horace Walpole approved, that man who approbated only the Artificial and the Misses Berry. “I make amende honorable to Mrs. Hart,” he said. “Her Attitudes are a whole theatre of grace and various expressions.”

“Everything she did was just and beautiful,” said the Duchess of Devonshire, “but her conversation, though perfectly good-natured and unaffected, was uninteresting, and her pronunciation very vulgar.”

Who would think so much could come of a mere Attitude? Things were indeed coming on. And even George had cheered up, the silly old thing, and was painting her again as everything—as Joan of Arc, as Magdalen, as Constance. Only the King remained to be consulted.

Hamilton waited upon him at Windsor. The result was a compromise. If the Queen would not receive her, the King would not object; if the King did not object, the Queen would not receive her. Thus whim and honor both were satisfied. A devoted couple, the Royal Pair were astute at compromise.

“Sir William,” said Emma, “has proposed.”

“To think that I should see the day,” said Mrs. Cadogan. She had not interfered. She had not hoped. She had been sure.

“Oh the good, good man,” she added perfunctorily, and blew her nose.

“And had I not something to do with it?” Emma was indignant.

“Indeed you had, but that is not something a woman confesses to, if she be wise,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

“I am glad,” said Lord Bristol, all Bishop of Derry again, and so appropriately benign, “that you have secured your own happiness.”

“Sir William has actually married his gallery of statues. They are set out on their return to Naples,” wrote Horace Walpole, elaborating, even while he purified, his style. It was one of his celebrated letters, he had not as yet decided to whom.

*

And so he had, at Marylebone Church, in the presence of Lord Abercorn and the secretary to the British Minister to the Court of Savoy. Greville did not attend.

If we do these things at all, we may just as well do them in church. But still, her sense of accomplishment, though concealed, diverted him, and since no man rushed into the church to show just cause, he went on with it and it was soon done. He had only wanted to give pleasure; therefore, the quicker out of England the better.

With unusual prudence, Emma had signed the register with her name by birth. She wished to be sure.

*

She had brought it off. It felt much the same as not being married, only with something left out, but she was now secure. On the last day before they left, she posed for George once more.

“Tell Hayley I am always reading his Triumphs of Temper. It was that that made me Lady H., for God knows I have had five years to try my temper,” she said. “I am afraid if it had not been for the good example Serena taught me, my girdle would have burst. If it had, I had been undone, for Sir W. minds temper more than beauty.”

“Emma,” said George, painting a stranger. “The Gods have been kind to you. You have never been in love.”

“I dote on Sir William,” said Emma indignantly, whom this one small point had perhaps been bothering.

“Ah, that’s not loving,” said George. “That’s not the same thing at all. That only comes afterward, or without, or never.”

He wanted to lay his brushes down. Spoiled by success? he thought. Nonsense, I was spoiled by my failure. We lose our talents when we lose heart, that’s all. It’s merely a matter of character. For most of us there comes a time, not when we wish to make little legends—we’re wiser than that—not to push away the bad things, but to soften their edges, to make an idyll out of pain, to show what it could have been, even to pretend that was the way it was. Or is. We enter into illusion the way a condemned man takes up residence in the death row. For who can paint against a spinning wheel?

At least she was still loving. “George,” she said, “you shall come to Naples and paint me as often as you like. Would you enjoy that? It will be like old times.”

“Yes, I should like that,” said George, and never saw her again.

*

On the last night of their stay, Sir William and she went to the theatre, where everyone ogled them and there was even a play for them to ogle. The leading actress was Jane Powell. Emma did not tell Sir William who Jane Powell was, but went backstage after the performance, by herself, to meet her; and then the congratulations were truly meaningful, or at any rate their meaning was underlined, overscored, kept private and enhanced, for they had been fellow servants at Dr. Budd’s in the old days, Jane Powell and she. Tears, joy, accomplishment, were all their conversation.

“I always said you did not lack ability,” said Jane Powell, speaking as one woman to another, which is to say as a professional actress.

“And I, that you were then my ideal,” said Emma, relaxed and therefore plainly lying.

“I knew,” said Jane Powell, simply.

“Your rise, though rapid, even to the callow eye of youth, was yet predictable,” said Emma.

So since Jane knew and Emma had risen, they corresponded for a year or two, in the moistest of terms. It does not do to lose touch with old friends, and besides, the acting profession is uncertain.