November 24.

Just as I was writing, had written, that sentence yesterday, came the letter which contained your notelet.  Thank you, thank you, dearest friend, it is very pleasant to have such a sign from your hand across the Alps of kindness and remembrance.  As to my sins in the choice of the Mont Cenis route, ‘Bradshaw’ was full of temptation, and the results to me have so entirely passed away now, that even the wholesome state of repentance is very faded in the colours.  What chiefly remains is the sense of wonderful contrast between climate and climate when we found ourselves at Genoa and in June.  I can’t get rid of the astonishment of it even now.  At Turin I had to keep up a fire most of the night in my bedroom, and at Genoa, with all the windows and doors open, we were gasping for breath, languid with the heat, blue burning skies overhead, and not enough stirring air for refreshment.  Nothing less, perhaps, would have restored me so soon, and it was delightful to be able during our last two days of our ten days there to stand on Andrea Doria’s terrace, and look out on that beautiful bay with its sweep of marble palaces.  My ‘unconquerable mind’ even carried me halfway up the lighthouse for the sake of the ‘view,’ only there I had to stop ingloriously, and let Robert finish the course alone while I rested on a bench:  aspiration is not everything, either in literature or lighthouses, you know, let us be ever so ‘insolvent.’

Well, and since we left Turin, everywhere in Italy we have found summer, summer—­not a fire have we needed even in Florence.  Such mornings, such evenings, such walkings out in the dusk, such sunsets over the Arno! ah, Mr. Kenyon, you in England forget what life is in this out-of-door fresh world, with your cloistral habits and necessities!  I assure you I can’t help fancying that the winter is over and gone, the past looks so cold and black in the warm light of the present.  We have had some rain, but at night, and only thundery frank rains which made the next day warmer, and I have all but lost my cough, and am feeling very well and very happy.

Oh, yes, it made me glad to see our poor darling Florence again; I do love Florence when all’s said against it, and when Robert (demoralised by Paris) has said most strongly that the place is dead, and dull, and flat, which it is, I must confess, particularly to our eyes fresh from the palpitating life of the Parisian boulevards, where we could scarcely find our way to Prichard’s for the crowd during our last fortnight there.  Poor Florence, so dead, as Robert says, and as we both feel, so trodden flat in the dust of the vineyards by these mules of Austria and these asses of the Papacy:  good heavens! how long are these things to endure?  I do love Florence, when all’s said.  The very calm, the very dying stillness is expressive and touching.  And then our house, our tables, our chairs, our carpets, everything looking rather better for our having been away!