It would have proved that he believed she was firm- which
was what she wished to seem to him. That alone was grateful to her
pride.
CHAPTER 22
On one of the first days of May, some six months after old Mr.
Touchett's death, a small group that might have been described by a
painter as composing well was gathered in one of the many rooms of
an ancient villa crowning an olive-muffled hill outside of the Roman
gate of Florence. The villa was a long, rather blank-looking
structure, with the far-projecting roof which Tuscany loves and which,
on the hills that encircle Florence, when considered from a
distance, make so harmonious a rectangle with the straight, dark,
definite cypresses that usually rise in groups of three or four beside
it. The house had a front upon a little grassy, empty, rural piazza
which occupied a part of the hill-top; and this front, pierced with
a few windows in irregular relations and furnished with a stone
bench lengthily adjusted to the base of the structure and useful as
a lounging-place to one or two persons wearing more or less of that
air of undervalued merit which in Italy, for some reason or other,
always gracefully invests any one who confidently assumes a
perfectly passive attitude- this antique, solid, weather-worn, yet
imposing front had a somewhat incommunicative character.
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