She came face to face with beauty and art made a part of daily life.  She thought she had never seen color, or flowers, or even a real sky, until now.  An existence unimaginably rich, vistas that receded into an almost fabled past, opened and spread before her glamourously.  The vividness of her impressions, her reaction to this new phase of experience, the whole-souled ardor with which she flung herself into the study of Italian, her eagerness to know more, her delight in the fine old house in which they had set up their household gods, amused and charmed Mrs. Vandervelde.  She felt as if she were teaching and training an unspoiled, delighted, and delightful child, and contact with this fresh and eager spirit stimulated her own.

Many of her former school friends, girls belonging to fine Florentine families, some now noble matrons, mothers of families, one or two great conventual superioresses, still resided in the city, and these welcomed their beloved Marcia delightedly.  There were, too, the American and English colonies, and a coterie of well-known artists.  Marcia Vandervelde was a born hostess, a center around which the brightest and cleverest naturally revolved.  She changed the large, drafty rooms of the old palace into charming reflections of her own personality.  A woman of wide sympathies and cultivated tastes, she delighted in the clever cosmopolitan society that gathered in her drawing-room; and it was in this opalescent social sea that she launched young Mrs. Champneys.

Mrs. Champneys was at first but a mild success, a sort of pale luminosity reflected from the more dominant Mrs. Vandervelde.  But it so happened, that a gifted young Italian lost his heart at sight to her red hair and green eyes, and discovering that she had no heart of her own—­at least, none for him—­he wrote, in a sort of frenzy of inspiration, a very fine sonnet sequence narrating his hapless passion.  The poet had been as extravagantly assertive as poets in love usually are, and the sonnets were really notable; so the young man was swept into a gust of fame; all Italy read his verse and sympathized with him.  The object of a popular poet’s romantic and unfortunate love is always the object of curiosity and interest, as Anne Champneys discovered to her surprise and annoyance.

“He was such a little idiot!” she told Marcia Vandervelde, disgustedly.  “Always sighing and rolling his eyes, and looking at one like a sick calf,—­more than once I was tempted to catch him by the shoulders and shake him!”

“He’s a poet, my child,” said Mrs. Vandervelde, mischievously, “and you’re the lady in the case.  It’s been the making of him, and it hasn’t done you any harm:  you’ll be a legend in your own lifetime.”

Marcia was quite right.  The poet’s love clung to Anne like an intangible perfume, and a halo of romance encircled her red head.  The Florentines discovered that she was beautiful; the English and Americans, cooler in judgment, found her charming.  And a noted German artist came along and declared that he had found in her his ideal Undine.