Given the rare mixture of the conventional and instinctive that was Emma Verplanck, something of the sort did indeed seem probable.  For ten years she had inhabited her nook, becoming as much of a fixture among us as the Campanile below.  She came, like so many, for the cheapness and dignity of it primarily.  Here her little patrimony meant independence, safety from perfunctory and uncongenial contacts at home, and more positively all those purtenances of the gentlewoman that she required.  But, unlike the merely thrifty Italianates, she never became blunted by our incessant tea giving and receiving.  With familiarity, the ineffable sweetness of the country penetrated her with ever-new impressions.  She loved the overlapping blue hills that stretched away endlessly from the rim of her valley, and the scarred crag that closed it from behind.  She loved the climbing white roads, her chalky brook—­sung as a river by the early poets—­with its bordering poplars and willows and its processional display of violets, anemones, primroses, blueflags, and roses.  She loved even better that constant passing trickle of fine intelligences which feeds the Arno valley as her brook refreshed its vineyard.  The best of these came gladly to her, for she was an open and a disillusioned spirit, with something of a man’s downrightness under her sensitive appreciation.  Hers was the calm of a temperament fined but not dulled by conformity and experience.  Mrs. Dennis, whose sources of information were excellent, said it was rather an unhappy girlish affair with an unworthy cousin.  Within the limits of the possible, the Verplancks always married cousins, and Emma, it was thought, had in her ’teens paid sentimental homage to the family tradition.  In any case she remained surprisingly youthful under her nearly forty years.  Her capacity for intellectual adventure seemed only to increase as she passed from the first glow to proved impressions of books, art, persons, and the all-inclusive Tuscan nature.

Her Stuyvesant Square aunts, who were authorities on self-sacrifice, agreed that the only sacrifice Emma had made in a thoroughly selfish life was the purchase of the St. Michael.  She had found it, on a visit in Romagna, in the hands of a noble family who knew its value and needed to sell it, but dreaded the vulgarity of a transaction through the antiquaries.  To Emma, accordingly, whom they assumed to be rich, they offered it at a price staggering for her, though still cheap for it.  From the first she had adored it.  There had been a swift exchange of despatches with New York, and the St. Michael went home with her to Florence.  After that adventure the small victoria, the stocky pony, and the solemn coachman had never reappeared.  Emma walked to teas or, when she must, suffered the promiscuity of the trams.  To those of us who knew the store she set by her equipage its exchange for the St. Michael indicated a fairly fanatical devotion.  To her aunts it meant that she had spent her principal, which, in their eyes, was an approximation to the mysterious “sin against the Holy Ghost.”