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 castles of the Rhine barons. It's just this incapacity to understand beauty of any kind, physical or moral or unmoral, that shuts America off, prevents people like you and me from being really happy here. Why, as soon as a girl marries in Maple Valley, she begins to look dowdy. How can you expect a person who does not appreciate the beauty of this lake, or of your Bohemian village, to appreciate the beauty of sex? Some day, Gareth, she was now speaking with more intensity, you must visit me at Settignano. My villa there is small; everything about it is simple; but also everything about it is beautiful. On the hills in the green twilight, amongst the cypresses, the gnarled, old, grey-green olive trees, the oleanders and the daphnes, fauns dance and Pan plays his pipes, while the peasants listen to the pagan revels and enjoy them. Why, in Italy, they even tolerate the Catholic Church. Everybody belongs to it, but at heart the Italians are not Catholics: they tolerate the church but, at heart, they do not believe in it. They still worship Jove and Juno and Iris and Minerva and Mars and Hebe and Ceres and Vulcan. To this day they bow down before Venus and Cupid.

How wonderful! Gareth exclaimed.

Some day, sighed the Countess, you will comprehend all this more fully. . . She began to tremble. This was not the moment, she felt, not the time or the place, to make her declaration. They were still standing by the border of the lake.