All happy times must end, and the happier the sooner. At one short
week's close they hurried on to Perugia.
And how full Alan had been of Perugia beforehand! He loved every
stone of the town, every shadow of the hillsides, he told Herminia
at Florence; and Herminia started on her way accordingly well
prepared to fall quite as madly in love with the Umbrian capital as
Alan himself had done.
The railway journey, indeed, seemed extremely pretty. What a march
of sweet pictures! They mounted with creaking wheels the slow
ascent up the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep, to the
white towers of Arezzo; then Cortona throned in state on its lonely
hill-top, and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls; next the low
bank, the lucid green water, the olive-clad slopes of reedy
Thrasymene; last of all, the sere hills and city-capped heights of
their goal, Perugia.
For its name's sake alone, Herminia was prepared to admire the
antique Umbrian capital. And Alan loved it so much, and was so
determined she ought to love it too, that she was ready to be
pleased with everything in it. Until she arrived there--and then,
oh, poor heart, what a grievous disappointment! It was late April
weather when they reached the station at the foot of that high hill
where Augusta Perusia sits lording it on her throne over the wedded
valleys of the Tiber and the Clitumnus. Tramontana was blowing.
No rain had fallen for weeks; the slopes of the lower Apennines,
ever dry and dusty, shone still drier and dustier than Alan had yet
beheld them. Herminia glanced up at the long white road, thick in
deep gray powder, that led by endless zigzags along the dreary
slope to the long white town on the shadeless hill-top. At first
sight alone, Perugia was a startling disillusion to Herminia. She
didn't yet know how bitterly she was doomed hereafter to hate every
dreary dirty street in it. But she knew at the first blush that
the Perugia she had imagined and pictured to herself didn't really
exist and had never existed.
She had figured in her own mind a beautiful breezy town, high set
on a peaked hill, in fresh and mossy country. She had envisaged
the mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods, and strewn with
huge boulders under whose umbrageous shelter bloomed waving masses
of the pretty pale blue Apennine anemones she saw sold in big
bunches at the street corners in Florence. She had imagined, in
short, that Umbria was a wilder Italian Wales, as fresh, as green,
as sweet-scented, as fountain-fed. And she knew pretty well whence
she had derived that strange and utterly false conception. She had
fancied Perugia as one of those mountain villages described by
Macaulay, the sort of hilltop stronghold