Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/196

 on the floors and on the stone biers, but she only looked at them reverently; everything was only waiting: the dead people would come back.

The grey shadows of these chambers grew dearer to her than the light of spring or summer in the thickets or on the sea. Their intense stillness seemed sweeter than even the sound of the waves she had so well loved. She returned to her home with sorrow; there were the jar of shrill voices, the hissing of oil in frying-pans, the cry of hurt animals, the rattle of copper vessels, the babble of sickly women.

An Italian village is never lovely.

There is always so much dust, so much dirt; there is so much stink of oil and sickly smell of silkworms; the dogs and cats and the fowls and mules look hungry and scared. The children play in mud or sand with some live thing they torture; even amidst the hills or beside the pastures they are always marring the beauty of the country thus. By the palsied shores of the Maremma this squalor, this cruelty, this unloveliness, were a thousandfold more painful.

When she went back to them from the silence and solemnity of the Etruscan moor-