The railway journey, indeed, seemed extremely pretty.  What a march of sweet pictures!  They mounted with creaking wheels the slow ascent up the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep, to the white towers of Arezzo; then Cortona throned in state on its lonely hill-top, and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls; next the low bank, the lucid green water, the olive-clad slopes of reedy Thrasymene; last of all, the sere hills and city-capped heights of their goal, Perugia.

For its name’s sake alone, Herminia was prepared to admire the antique Umbrian capital.  And Alan loved it so much, and was so determined she ought to love it too, that she was ready to be pleased with everything in it.  Until she arrived there—­and then, oh, poor heart, what a grievous disappointment!  It was late April weather when they reached the station at the foot of that high hill where Augusta Perusia sits lording it on her throne over the wedded valleys of the Tiber and the Clitumnus.  Tramontana was blowing.  No rain had fallen for weeks; the slopes of the lower Apennines, ever dry and dusty, shone still drier and dustier than Alan had yet beheld them.  Herminia glanced up at the long white road, thick in deep gray powder, that led by endless zigzags along the dreary slope to the long white town on the shadeless hill-top.  At first sight alone, Perugia was a startling disillusion to Herminia.  She didn’t yet know how bitterly she was doomed hereafter to hate every dreary dirty street in it.  But she knew at the first blush that the Perugia she had imagined and pictured to herself didn’t really exist and had never existed.

She had figured in her own mind a beautiful breezy town, high set on a peaked hill, in fresh and mossy country.  She had envisaged the mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods, and strewn with huge boulders under whose umbrageous shelter bloomed waving masses of the pretty pale blue Apennine anemones she saw sold in big bunches at the street corners in Florence.  She had imagined, in short, that Umbria was a wilder Italian Wales, as fresh, as green, as sweet-scented, as fountain-fed.  And she knew pretty well whence she had derived that strange and utterly false conception.  She had fancied Perugia as one of those mountain villages described by Macaulay, the sort of hilltop stronghold

“That, hid by beech and pine,
Like an eagle’s nest hangs on the crest
Of purple Apennine.”

Instead of that, what manner of land did she see actually before her?  Dry and shadeless hill-sides, tilled with obtrusive tilth to their topmost summit; ploughed fields and hoary olive-groves silvering to the wind, in interminable terraces; long suburbs, unlovely in their gaunt, bare squalor, stretching like huge arms of some colossal cuttlefish over the spurs and shoulders of that desecrated mountain.  No woods, no moss, no coolness, no greenery; all nature toned down to one monotonous grayness.  And this dreary desert was indeed the place where her baby must be born, the baby predestined to regenerate humanity!