Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/498

 back, a white face, indescribable, that anticipated the guillotine. He assented to everything that was proposed, and was perched apparently on heights of contemplation inaccessible to the others. His mother rarely removed her eyes from him; and, if a while before this would greatly have irritated him, he now seemed wholly unconscious of her observation and deeply indifferent to anything that might befall him. They spent a couple of days on the Lake of Como, at an hotel with white porticoes smothered in oleander and myrtle and terrace-steps leading down to little boats under striped awnings. They agreed it was the earthly paradise, and they passed the mornings in strolls through the cedarn alleys of classic villas and the evenings afloat beneath the stars, in a circle of outlined mountains, to the music of silver-trickling oars. One afternoon the two young men wandered away together as they had wandered of old. They followed the winding foot path that led toward Como, close to the lakeside, past the gates of villas and the walls of vineyards, through little hamlets propped on a dozen arches and bathing their feet and their pendent tatters in the grey-green ripple; past frescoed walls and crumbling campanili and grassy village piazzettas and the mouth of soft ravines that wound upward, through belts of swinging vine and vaporous olive and wide-armed chequering chestnut, to high ledges where white chapels gleamed amid the paler boskage and bare cliff-surfaces, with their blistered lips, drank in the liquid light. It all was consummately romantic; it was the Italy we know from the 464