The time, too, was unfortunate, after no rain for weeks; for rainlessness, besides doubling the native stock of dust, brings out to the full the ancestral Etruscan odors of Perugia.  So, when next morning Herminia found herself installed in a dingy flat, in a morose palazzo, in the main street of the city, she was glad that Alan insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases of groceries and provisions, because it gave her a chance of flinging herself on her bed in a perfect agony of distress and disappointment, and having a good cry, all alone, at the aspect of the home where she was to pass so many eventful weeks of her existence.

Dusty, gusty Perugia!  O baby, to be born for the freeing of woman, was it here, was it here you must draw your first breath, in an air polluted by the vices of centuries!

XI.

Somewhat later in the day, they went out for a stroll through the town together.  To Herminia’s great relief, Alan never even noticed she had been crying.  Man-like, he was absorbed in his own delight.  She would have felt herself a traitor if Alan had discovered it.

“Which way shall we go?” she asked listlessly, with a glance to right and left, as they passed beneath the sombre Tuscan gate of their palazzo.

And Alan answered, smiling, “Why, what does it matter?  Which way you like.  Every way is a picture.”

And so it was, Herminia herself was fain to admit, in a pure painter’s sense that didn’t at all attract her.  Lines grouped themselves against the sky in infinite diversity.  Whichever way they turned quaint old walls met their eyes, and tumble-down churches, and mouldering towers, and mediaeval palazzi with carved doorways or rich loggias.  But whichever way they turned dusty roads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb, unwholesome airs, sickening sights and sounds and perfumes.  Narrow streets swept, darkling, under pointed archways, that framed distant vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solid blue sky of Italy.  The crystal hardness of that sapphire firmament repelled Herminia.  They passed beneath the triumphal arch of Augustus with its Etruscan mason-work, its Roman decorations, and round the antique walls, aglow with tufted gillyflowers, to the bare Piazza d’Armi.  A cattle fair was going on there; and Alan pointed with pleasure to the curious fact that the oxen were all cream-colored,—­the famous white steers of Clitumnus.  Herminia knew her Virgil as well as Alan himself, and murmured half aloud the sonorous hexameter, “Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos.”  But somehow, the knowledge that these were indeed the milk-white bullocks of Clitumnus failed amid so much dust to arouse her enthusiasm.  She would have been better pleased just then with a yellow English primrose.