His words struck dumb horror into Herminia's soul. Poor child, how
she shrank at it! It was clear, then, instead of being shocked and
disgusted, Alan positively admired this human Sahara. With an
effort she gulped down her tears and her sighs, and pretended to
look with interest in the directions he pointed. SHE could see
nothing in it all but dry hill-sides, crowned with still drier
towns; unimagined stretches of sultry suburb; devouring wastes of
rubbish and foul immemorial kitchen-middens. And the very fact
that for Alan's sake she couldn't bear to say so--seeing how
pleased and proud he was of Perugia, as if it had been built from
his own design--made the bitterness of her disappointment more
difficult to endure. She would have given anything at that moment
for an ounce of human sympathy.
She had to learn in time to do without it.
They spent that night at the comfortable hotel, perhaps the best in
Italy. Next morning, they were to go hunting for apartments in the
town, where Alan knew of a suite that would exactly suit them.
After dinner, in the twilight, filled with his artistic joy at
being back in Perugia, his beloved Perugia, he took Herminia out
for a stroll, with a light wrap round her head, on the terrace of
the Prefettura. The air blew fresh and cool now with a certain
mountain sharpness; for, as Alan assured her with pride, they stood
seventeen hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean. The
moon had risen; the sunset glow had not yet died off the slopes of
the Assisi hill-sides. It streamed through the perforated belfry
of San Domenico; it steeped in rose-color the slender and turreted
shaft of San Pietro, "Perugia's Pennon," the Arrowhead of Umbria.
It gilded the gaunt houses that jut out upon the spine of the Borgo
hill into the valley of the Tiber. Beyond, rose shadowy Apennines,
on whose aerial flanks towns and villages shone out clear in the
mellow moonlight. Far away on their peaks faint specks of
twinkling fire marked indistinguishable sites of high hill-top
castles.
Alan turned to her proudly. "Well, what do you think of that?" he
asked with truly personal interest.
Herminia could only gasp out in a half reluctant way, "It's a
beautiful view, Alan. Beautiful; beautiful; beautiful!"
But she felt conscious to herself it owed its beauty in the main
to the fact that the twilight obscured so much of it. To-morrow
morning, the bare hills would stand out once more in all their
pristine bareness; the white roads would shine forth as white and
dusty as ever; the obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselves
at every turn upon eye and nostril. She hated the place, to say
the truth; it was a terror to her to think she had to stop so long
in it.