The Senator, momma, and Mrs. Portheris stood in the cathedral door.  Isabel and Mr. Mafferton occupied the middle distance.  Mr. Mafferton stooped to add a poppy to a slender handful of wild flowers he held out to her.  Isabel was looking back.

“It will be pleasant inside the Duomo,” I said.  “Let us go on.  I feel warm.  I agree with you that the situation is serious, Dicky.  Look at those poppies!  When an Englishman does that you may make up your mind to the worst.  But I don’t think anybody need have the slightest respect for the affections of Mr. Mafferton.”

Inside the Duomo it was pleasant, and cool, and there was a dim religious light that gave one an opportunity for reflection.  I was so much engaged in reflection that I failed to notice the shape of the Duomo, but I have since learned that it was a basilica, in the form of a Latin cross, and was simply full of things which should have claimed my attention.  Momma took copious notes from which I see that the Madonna and Child holy water basin was perfectly sweet, and the episcopal throne by Uervellesi in 1536 was the finest piece of tarsia work in the world, and the large bronze hanging lamp by Vincenzo Possento was the object which assisted Galileo to invent the oscillations of the pendulum.  The Senator was much taken with the inlaid wooden stalls in the choir, the subjects were so lively.  He and his Aunt Caroline nearly came to words over a monkey regarding its reflection in a looking glass, done with a realism which Mrs. Portheris considered little short of profane, but which poppa found quite an excusable filip to devotions which must have been such an all day business in the sixteenth century.  Outside, however, poppa found it difficult to approve the facade.  To throw four galleries over the street door, he said, with no visible means of getting into them or possible object for sitting there, was about the most ridiculous waste of building space he had yet observed.

“But then,” said Dicky Dod, who kept his disconsolate place by my side, “they didn’t seem to know how to waste enough in those pre-elevator days.  Look at the pictures and the bronzes and the marble columns inside there—­ten times as much as they had any use for.  They just heaped it up.”

“That’s so, Dicky, my boy,” replied poppa; “we could cover more ground with the money in our century.  But you’ve got to remember that they hadn’t any other way worth mentioning of spending the taxes.  Religion, so to speak, was the boss contractor’s only line.”

Dicky remarked that it had to be admitted he worked it on the square, and momma said that no doubt people built as well as they knew how at that time, but nothing should induce her to add her weight to the top of the Leaning Tower.

“It is very remarkable and impressive,” said momma, “the idea of its hanging over that way all these centuries, just on the drop and never dropping, but who knows that it may not come down this very day!”