Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/120

Rh understood anything that was in the very least complex.

And then again she was more irritated still with herself, for admitting even to her own thoughts that there was anything complex, or that she did not want to examine too closely—just yet. And then she sat and looked into the fire, and thought of Palestrina, with its sweet faint scent of Parma violets, and its dim noble frescoes, and its mountain solitudes, under the clear winter moon.

She sat dreaming about it a long time—for her, because she was not a person that dreamed at all usually. Her life was too brilliant, and too much occupied, and too artificial. She was thinking, with a great deal of money, without desecrating it by "restoration;" but by bringing all the art knowledge in the world to its enrichment, it would be possible to make it as great as it had been in the days of its cardinal. What a pastime it would be, what an interest, what an occupation almost for a lifetime to render that grand old palace once more the world's wonder it had been in the sixteenth century!

Rh