It was an irritable couple who took
tickets to Monteriano.
"Singles or returns?" said he.
"A single for me," said Harriet peevishly; "I shall
never get back alive."
"Sweet creature!" said her brother, suddenly breaking
down. "How helpful you will be when we come to Signor Carella!"
"Do you suppose," said Harriet, standing still among a
whirl of porters--"do you suppose I am going to enter that
man's house?"
"Then what have you come for, pray? For ornament?"
"To see that you do your duty."
"Oh, thanks!"
"So mother told me. For goodness sake get the tickets;
here comes that hot woman again! She has the impudence to bow."
"Mother told you, did she?" said Philip wrathfully, as
he went to struggle for tickets at a slit so narrow that
they were handed to him edgeways. Italy was beastly, and
Florence station is the centre of beastly Italy. But he had
a strange feeling that he was to blame for it all; that a
little influx into him of virtue would make the whole land
not beastly but amusing. For there was enchantment, he was
sure of that; solid enchantment, which lay behind the
porters and the screaming and the dust. He could see it in
the terrific blue sky beneath which they travelled, in the
whitened plain which gripped life tighter than a frost, in
the exhausted reaches of the Arno, in the ruins of brown
castles which stood quivering upon the hills. He could see
it, though his head ached and his skin was twitching, though
he was here as a puppet, and though his sister knew how he
was here.
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