Once, Veronica had insisted upon going through the palace.  She would never enter it again, and after that day, when she passed it, she turned her face from it and looked away.  Vaguely, she wondered whether they were not deceiving her and whether it were really the home she dimly remembered.  There had been splendid things in it, then—­she would not ask what had become of them, but without asking, she was told that they had been wisely disposed of, and that instead of paying people for keeping an uninhabited palace in order, she was receiving an enormous rent for it from the city.

Then she had wished to see the lovely villa that came back in the pictures of her dreams, and she had been driven out into the country according to her desire.  From a distance, as the carriage approached it, she recognized the lordly poplars, and far at the end of the avenue the elaborately stuccoed front and cornices of the old-fashioned “barocco” building.  But the gardens were gone.  Files of neatly trimmed vines, trained upon poles stuck in deep furrows, stretched away from the avenue on either side.  The flower garden was a vegetable garden now, and the artichokes and the cabbages and the broccoli were planted with mathematical regularity up to the very walls.  There were hens and chickens on the steps and running in and out of the open door, and from a near sty the grunt of many pigs reached her ears.  A pale, earthy-skinned peasant, scantily clad in dusty canvas, grinned sadly and kissed the hem of her skirt, calling her ‘Excellency’ and beginning at once to beg for reduction of rent.  A field-worn woman, filthy and dishevelled, drove back half a dozen nearly naked children whose little legs were crusted with dry mud, and whose faces had not been washed for a long time.

And within, there was no furniture.  In the rooms upstairs were stores of grain and potatoes, and red peppers and grapes hanging on strings.  The cracked mirrors, built into the gilded stucco, were coated with heavy unctuous dust, and the fine old painted tiles on the floor were loose and broken in places.  In the ceiling certain pink and well-fed cherubs still supported unnatural thunderclouds through which Juno forever drove her gold-wheeled car and team of patient peacocks, smiling high and goddess-like at the squalor beneath.  Still Diana bent over Endymion cruelly foreshortened in his sleep, beyond the possibility of a waking return to human proportions.  Mars frowned, Jove threatened, Venus rose glowing from the sea; and below, the unctuous black dust settled and thickened on everything except the cracked floors piled with maize and beans and lupins, and rubbed bright between the heaps by the peasants’ naked feet.