For her
room had looked upon the narrowest and darkest of the streets, though
it had been stately enough within, and luxuriously furnished, besides
containing some objects of value and beauty over which there would be
much bidding and squabbling of amateurs and experts when the great
sale took place.
It had been gloomy and silent and loveless, the life down there; and
yet she would have gone back to it if she could, from the sunshine of
the Via Ludovisi, and from the overpowering freshness of the Volterra
house, where everything was modern, and polished, and varnished, and
in perfect condition, suggesting that things had been just paid for.
She had not liked the old life, but she liked her present surroundings
even less, and at times she felt a furious longing to leave them
suddenly, without warning; to go out when no one would notice her, and
never to come back; to go she knew not where, out into the world,
risking she knew not what, a high-born, penniless, fair-haired girl
not yet eighteen.
What would happen, if she did? She rarely laughed, but she would laugh
at that, when she thought of the consternation her flight would
produce. How puzzled the fat Baron would look, how the Baroness's thin
mouth would be drawn down at the corners! How the invisible silk
bellows would puff as she ran up and down stairs, searching the house
for Sabina!
There was more than one strain of wild blood in the delicate girl's
veins, and the spring had come suddenly, with a bursting out of
blossom and life and colour, and a twittering of nesting birds in the
old gardens, and a rush of strange longings in her heart.
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