Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/96

Rh square where it is the pleasure of fashionable Floralia to stop its carriages in the course of the drive before dinner.

The piazza is the most unlovely part of the park: it has a gaunt red café and a desert of hard-beaten sand, and in the middle there are some few plants, and a vast quantity of iron bordering laid out in geometrical patterns, with more hard-beaten sand between them, this being the modern Floralian idea of a garden; to which fatal idea are sacrificed the noble ilex shades, the bird-filled cedar groves, the deep delicious dreamful avenues, the moss-grown ways, and the leaf-covered fountains, worthy to shelter Narcissus and to bathe Nausicaa, which their wiser forefathers knew were alike the blessing and the glory of this land of the sun.

Nevertheless—perhaps because it is the last place in the world where anybody would be supposed ever voluntarily to stop a carriage—here motley modern society delights to group its fusing nationalities; and the same people who bored each other in the morning's calls, and will bore each other in the evening's receptions, bore each other