She had not come with any settled purpose beyond a vague idea of
having her portrait painted by the French artist, and unless she took
the trouble to make acquaintances, there was nothing attractive enough
about the capital to keep her. She allowed herself to be driven about
the town, on pretence of seeing churches and galleries, but in reality
she saw very little of either. She was preoccupied with her own thoughts
and subject to fits of abstraction. Most things seemed to her intensely
dull, and the unhappy guide who had been selected to accompany her on
her excursions, wasted his learning upon her on the first morning, and
subsequently exhausted the magnificent catalogue of impossibilities
which he had concocted for the especial benefit of the uncultivated
foreigner, without eliciting so much as a look of interest or an
expression of surprise. He was a young and fascinating guide, wearing a
white satin tie, and on the third day he recited some verses of
Stecchetti and was about to risk a declaration of worship in ornate
prose, when he was suddenly rather badly scared by the lady's yellow
eyes, and ran on nervously with a string of deceased popes and their
dates.
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