Salvatore which produced active-mindedness in all except the natives.  They, as before, whatever the beauty around them, whatever the prodigal seasons did, remained immune from thoughts other than those they were accustomed to.  All their lives they had seen, year by year, the amazing recurrent spectacle of April in the gardens, and custom had made it invisible to them.  They were as blind to it, as unconscious of it, as Domenico’s dog asleep in the sun.

The visitors could not be blind to it—­it was too arresting after London in a particularly wet and gloomy March.  Suddenly to be transported to that place where the air was so still that it held its breath, where the light was so golden that the most ordinary things were transfigured—­to be transported into that delicate warmth, that caressing fragrance, and to have the old grey castle as the setting, and, in the distance, the serene clear hills of Perugini’s backgrounds, was an astonishing contrast.  Even Lady Caroline, used all her life to beauty, who had been everywhere and seen everything, felt the surprise of it.  It was, that year, a particularly wonderful spring, and of all the months at San Salvatore April, if the weather was fine, was best.  May scorched and withered; March was restless, and could be hard and cold in its brightness; but April came along softly like a blessing, and if it were a fine April it was so beautiful that it was impossible not to feel different, not to feel stirred and touched.

Mrs. Wilkins, we have seen, responded to it instantly.  She, so to speak, at once flung off all her garments and dived straight into glory, unhesitatingly, with a cry of rapture.

Mrs. Arbuthnot was stirred and touched, but differently.  She had odd sensations—­presently to be described.

Mrs. Fisher, being old, was of a closer, more impermeable texture, and offered more resistance; but she too had odd sensations, also in their place to be described.

Lady Caroline, already amply acquainted with beautiful houses and climates, to whom they could not come quite with the same surprise, yet was very nearly as quick to react as Mrs. Wilkins.  The place had an almost instantaneous influence on her as well, and of one part of this influence she was aware:  it had made her, beginning on the very first evening, want to think, and acted on her curiously like a conscience.  What this conscience seemed to press upon her notice with an insistence that startled her—­Lady Caroline hesitated to accept the work, but it would keep on coming into her head—­was that she was tawdry.

She must think that out.