How
her soul was in her possessions! I stood and watched her. Then she went
into the road and under the trees, haughty, a demoiselle. She had on
white kid boots.
I thought of the Lake of Como what I had thought of Lugano: it must have
been wonderful when the Romans came there. Now it is all villas. I think
only the sunrise is still wonderful, sometimes.
I took the steamer down to Como, and slept in a vast old stone cavern of
an inn, a remarkable place, with rather nice people. In the morning I
went out. The peace and the bygone beauty of the cathedral created the
glow of the great past. And in the market-place they were selling
chestnuts wholesale, great heaps of bright, brown chestnuts, and sacks
of chestnuts, and peasants very eager selling and buying. I thought of
Como, it must have been wonderful even a hundred years ago. Now it is
cosmopolitan, the cathedral is like a relic, a museum object, everywhere
stinks of mechanical money-pleasure. I dared not risk walking to Milan:
I took a train. And there, in Milan, sitting in the Cathedral Square, on
Saturday afternoon, drinking Bitter Campari and watching the swarm of
Italian city-men drink and talk vivaciously, I saw that here the life
was still vivid, here the process of disintegration was vigorous, and
centred in a multiplicity of mechanical activities that engage the human
mind as well as the body.
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