They said indeed that the electric trams and the '70
buildings, and that criminal advertisement that glares upon the Forum,
outraged their aesthetic feelings unspeakably; but that was only part
of the fun. And indeed Rome is such a wonderful place that it made
Miss Winchelsea forget some of her most carefully prepared enthusiasms
at times, and Helen, taken unawares, would suddenly admit the beauty
of unexpected things. Yet Fanny and Helen would have liked a shop
window or so in the English quarter if Miss Winchelsea's uncompromising
hostility to all other English visitors had not rendered that district
impossible.
The intellectual and aesthetic fellowship of Miss Winchelsea and
the scholarly young man passed insensibly towards a deeper feeling.
The exuberant Fanny did her best to keep pace with their recondite
admiration by playing her "beautiful," with vigour, and saying "Oh!
LET'S go," with enormous appetite whenever a new place of interest
was mentioned. But Helen developed a certain want of sympathy
towards the end, that disappointed Miss Winchelsea a little. She
refused to "see anything" in the face of Beatrice Cenci--Shelley's
Beatrice Cenci!--in the Barberini gallery; and one day, when they
were deploring the electric trams, she said rather snappishly that
"people must get about somehow, and it's better than torturing
horses up these horrid little hills.
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