They spent that night at the comfortable hotel, perhaps the best in Italy.  Next morning, they were to go hunting for apartments in the town, where Alan knew of a suite that would exactly suit them.  After dinner, in the twilight, filled with his artistic joy at being back in Perugia, his beloved Perugia, he took Herminia out for a stroll, with a light wrap round her head, on the terrace of the Prefettura.  The air blew fresh and cool now with a certain mountain sharpness; for, as Alan assured her with pride, they stood seventeen hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean.  The moon had risen; the sunset glow had not yet died off the slopes of the Assisi hill-sides.  It streamed through the perforated belfry of San Domenico; it steeped in rose-color the slender and turreted shaft of San Pietro, “Perugia’s Pennon,” the Arrowhead of Umbria.  It gilded the gaunt houses that jut out upon the spine of the Borgo hill into the valley of the Tiber.  Beyond, rose shadowy Apennines, on whose aerial flanks towns and villages shone out clear in the mellow moonlight.  Far away on their peaks faint specks of twinkling fire marked indistinguishable sites of high hill-top castles.

Alan turned to her proudly.  “Well, what do you think of that?” he asked with truly personal interest.

Herminia could only gasp out in a half reluctant way, “It’s a beautiful view, Alan.  Beautiful; beautiful; beautiful!”

But she felt conscious to herself it owed its beauty in the main to the fact that the twilight obscured so much of it.  To-morrow morning, the bare hills would stand out once more in all their pristine bareness; the white roads would shine forth as white and dusty as ever; the obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselves at every turn upon eye and nostril.  She hated the place, to say the truth; it was a terror to her to think she had to stop so long in it.

Most famous towns, in fact, need to be twice seen:  the first time briefly to face the inevitable disappointment to our expectations; the second time, at leisure, to reconstruct and appraise the surviving reality.  Imagination so easily beggars performance.  Rome, Cairo, the Nile, are obvious examples; the grand exceptions are Venice and Florence,—­in a lesser degree, Bruges, Munich, Pisa.  As for Umbria, ’tis a poor thing; our own Devon snaps her fingers at it.

Moreover, to say the truth, Herminia was too fresh to Italy to appreciate the smaller or second-rate towns at their real value.  Even northerners love Florence and Venice at first sight; those take their hearts by storm; but Perugia, Siena, Orvieto, are an acquired taste, like olives and caviare, and it takes time to acquire it.  Alan had not made due allowance for this psychological truth of the northern natures.  A Celt in essence, thoroughly Italianate himself, and with a deep love for the picturesque, which often makes men insensible to dirt and discomfort, he expected to Italianize Herminia too rapidly.  Herminia, on the other hand, belonged more strictly to the intellectual and somewhat inartistic English type.  The picturesque alone did not suffice for her.  Cleanliness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul than the quaintest street corners, the oddest old archways; she pined in Perugia for a green English hillside.