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 the Mugnone Valley, that a year before his mules had died and he had found work in Florence.

He drove a smart little English pony cart, so obviously bought to please Mamma that Lanice could not see it without visualizing her mother sitting upon the seat, smiling and flicking the whip. Now it was Lanice who drove and Roger took a lazy pleasure in her efforts to avoid the swarming beggars and children. She was so like her mother in some ways, yet fundamentally older—born older. She was a fiery thing in her own way, but lacked the careless radiant pagan spirit that had made the college boy turn to Hittie in his desperate need, after he had seen the writing upon the wall. She, disappointed in that Mr. Matthews of New York, and for some reason out of sympathy with this daughter, had been wild to get away from Amherst and that erudite husband of hers. She wanted to go to Italy and live, and he wanted to go there and die. Well, she was in her grave, poor soul, and he, poisoned and listless, tasting with every cough the corruption of his body as though he had rotted at the core. She dead, and he coughing and raising blood every morning. My God, my God! Life hurt with sudden agony as a grass-blade cuts the finger.

'Yes, that's the Badia. We'll go there some day, Lanice. There's little of Arnolfo's thirteenth-century work left, but there's a splendid Filippino Lippi altarpiece and it was here that Boccaccio used to lecture on Dante.