To Cranbrook the daily companionship with these kind-hearted, primitive people had been a most refreshing experience.  As he wrote to a friend at home, he had shaken off the unwholesome dust which had accumulated upon his soul, and had for the first time in his life breathed the undiluted air of healthful human intercourse.  Annunciata was to him a living poem, a simple and stately epic, whose continuation from day to day filled his life with sonorous echoes.  She was a modern Nausicaa, with the same child-like grandeur and unconscious dignity as her Homeric prototype.  It was not until to-day that he had become aware of the distance which separated him from her.  They had visited together the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, where a crude tableau of the Nativity of Christ is exhibited during Christmas week.  Her devoutness in the presence of the jewelled doll, representing the infant Saviour, had made a painful impression upon him, and when, with the evident intention of compelling his reverence, she had told him of the miracles performed by the “Bambino,” he had only responded with an incredulous smile.  She had sent him a long, reproachful glance; then, as the tears rose to her eyes, she had hurried away and he had not dared to follow her.

While pursuing these sombre meditations, Cranbrook was seated—­or rather buried—­in a deep Roman easy-chair, whose faded tapestries would have been esteemed a precious find by a relic-hunter.  Judging by the baroque style of its decorations, its tarnished gilding, and its general air a la Pompadour, it was evident that it had spent its youthful days in some princely palace of the last century, and had by slow and gradual stages descended to its present lowly condition.  A curious sense of the evanescence of all earthly things stole over the young man’s mind, as his thoughts wandered from his own fortunes to those of the venerable piece of furniture which was holding him in its ample embrace.  What did it matter in the end, he reasoned, whether he married his Nausicaa or not?  To marry a Nausicaa with grace was a feat for the performance of which exceptional qualities were required.  The conjugal complement to a Nausicaa must be a man of ponderous presence and statuesque demeanor—­not a shrill and nervous modern like himself, with second-rate physique, and a morbidly active intellect.  No, it mattered little what he did or left undone.  The world would be no better and no worse for anything he could do.  Very likely, in the arms of this chair where he was now sitting, a dozen Roman Romeos, in powdered wigs and silk stockings, had pined for twice that number of Roman Juliets; and now they were all dust, and the world was moving on exactly as before.  And yet in the depth of his being there was a voice which protested against this hollow reasoning; he felt to himself insincere and hypocritical; he dallied and played with his own emotions.  Every mood carried in itself a sub-consciousness of its transitoriness.