Page:Gissing - The Emancipated, vol. I, 1890.djvu/82

24 or affected to love, those only who had found inspiration south of the Alps. The proud mother would tell you a story of Barbara's going up to the wall of Casa Guidi and kissing it. In her view, the modern Italians could do no wrong; they were divinely regenerate. She praised their architecture.

Madeline—whom her sisters addressed affectionately as "Mad."—professed a wider intellectual scope; less given to the melting mood than Barbara, less naive in her enthusiasms, she took for her province aesthetic criticism in its totality, and shone rather in censure than in laudation. French she read passably; German she had talked much of studying that it was her belief sin- had acquired it ; Greek and Latin in were not indeed linguistically known to her one must pick one's phrases in speaking of Madeline—but from modern essayists who wrote in the flamboyant style she had gathered so much knowledge of these literatures as to be able to discourse of them