“You know England, signor?”

“When I tell you that I married an English-woman, and that both my sons have English blood in their veins, you will realize the sincerity of my devotion.  My dear wife was a Somerset.”

Mary May always declared that the old Italian won her heart and even awakened something akin to affection before she had known him half an hour.  There was a fascination in his admixture of childish simplicity and varied knowledge.  None, indeed, could resist his gracious humor and old-world courtesies.  The old man could be simple and ingenuous, too; but only when it pleased him so to be; and it was not the second childishness of age, for his intellect remained keen and moved far more swiftly than any at Chadlands.  But he was modest and loved a jest.  The hand of time had indeed touched him, and sometimes his memory broke down and he faltered with a verbal difficulty; but this only appeared to happen when he was weary.

“The morning is my good time,” he told them.  “You will, I fear, find me a stupid old fellow after dinner.”

Signor Mannetti proved a tremendous talker, and implicitly revealed that he belonged to the nobility of his country, and that he enjoyed the friendship of many notable men.  The subject of his visit was not mentioned on the day of his arrival.  He spoke only of Italy, laughed to think he had passed through Florence to seek Sir Walter in England, and then, finding his hostess a neophyte at the shrines of art, attuned himself to the subject for her benefit.

“If you found pictures answer to an unknown need within yourself, that is very well,” he declared.  “About music I know little; but concerning painting a great deal.  And you desire to know, too, I see.  The spirit is willing, but the spirit probably does not know yet what lies in front of it.  You are groping—­blind, childlike—­ without a hand to guard and an authority to guide.  That is merely to waste time.  When you go back to Italy, you must begin at the beginning, if you are in earnest—­not at the middle.  Only ignorance measures art in terms of skill, for there are no degrees in art.  None has transcended Giotto, because technique and draughtsmanship are accidents of time; they lie outside the soul of the matter.  Art is in fact a static thing.  It changes as the face of the sea changes, from hour to hour; but it does not progress.  There are great and small artists and great and small movements, as there are great and small waves, brisk breezes and terrific tempests; but all are moulded of like substance.  In the one case art, in the other, the ocean, remains unchanged.  I shall plan your instruction for you, if you please, and send you to the primitives first—­the mighty ones who laid the foundations.  I lived five years at Siena—­for love of the beginnings; and you must also learn to love and reverence the beginnings, if you would understand that light in the darkness men call the Renaissance.”