While this idea of a specific for her malady endured travelling at speed to the ridges of the Italian frontier, across France—­she simply remembered Nevil:  he was distant; he had no place in the storied landscape, among the images of Art and the names of patient great men who bear, as they bestow, an atmosphere other than earth’s for those adoring them.  If at night, in her sleep, he was a memory that conducted her through scenes which were lightnings, the cool swift morning of her flight released her.  France, too, her rival!—­the land of France, personified by her instinctively, though she had no vivid imaginative gift, did not wound her with a poisoned dart.—­’She knew him first:  she was his first love.’  The Alps, and the sense of having Italy below them, renewed Cecilia’s lofty-perching youth.  Then—­I am in Italy! she sighed with rapture.  The wine of delight and oblivion was at her lips.

But thirst is not enjoyment, and a satiated thirst that we insist on over-satisfying to drown the recollection of past anguish, is baneful to the soul.  In Rome Cecilia’s vision of her track to Rome was of a run of fire over a heath.  She could scarcely feel common pleasure in Rome.  It seemed burnt out.

Flung back on herself, she was condemned to undergo the bitter torment she had flown from:  jealous love, and reproachful; and a shame in it like nothing she had yet experienced.  Previous pains were but Summer lightnings, passing shadows.  She could have believed in sorcery:  the man had eaten her heart!

A disposition to mocking humour, foreign to her nature, gave her the notion of being off her feet, in the claws of a fabulous bird.  It served to veil her dulness.  An ultra-English family in Rome, composed, shocking to relate, of a baronet banker and his wife, two faint-faced girls, and a young gentleman of our country, once perhaps a light-limbed boy, chose to be followed by their footman in the melancholy pomp of state livery.  Wherever she encountered them Cecilia talked Nevil Beauchamp.  Even Mr. Tuckham perceived it.  She was extremely uncharitable:  she extended her ungenerous criticism to the institution of the footman:  England, and the English, were lashed.

‘These people are caricatures,’ Tuckham said, in apology for poor England burlesqued abroad.  ’You must not generalize on them.  Footmen are footmen all the world over.  The cardinals have a fine set of footmen.’

’They are at home.  Those English sow contempt of us all over Europe.  We cannot but be despised.  One comes abroad foredoomed to share the sentiment.  This is your middle-class!  What society can they move in, that sanctions a vulgarity so perplexing?  They have the air of ornaments on a cottager’s parlour mantelpiece.’

Tuckham laughed.  ‘Something of that,’ he said.

‘Evidently they seek distinction, and they have it, of that kind,’ she continued.  ’It is not wonderful that we have so much satirical writing in England, with such objects of satire.  It may be as little wonderful that the satire has no effect.  Immense wealth and native obtuseness combine to disfigure us with this aspect of overripeness, not to say monstrosity.  I fall in love with the poor, and think they have a cause to be pleaded, when I look at those people.  We scoff at the vanity of the French, but it is a graceful vanity; pardonable compared with ours.’