'He is an angel. We ride in the morning, we sing and play in the evening. We adore each other all the twenty-four hours through. I wonder however I could have lived without him. I am longing to see all he tells me about his great marble palaces, and his immense dreamlike villas, and his gardens with their multitude of statues, and the wonderful light that is over it all. He protests it is always twilight with us in England. It seems so absurd, when nowadays everybody knows everything about everywhere, that I should never have been to Italy. But we were such country mice down at dear, old, dull, green, muddy Ditchworth. Lanciano, the biggest of all their big places, must be like a poem. It is a great house, all of different coloured marbles, set amidst ilex groves on the mountain side, with cascades like Terni, and gardens that were planned by Giulio Romano, and temples that were there in the days of Horace. I long to see it all, and yet I hope he will not want to leave Coombe yet. There is no place like the place where one is _first_ happy. And somehow, I fancy I look better in these homely, low rooms of Aunt Carrie's, with their Chippendale furniture and their smell of dry rose leaves, than I shall do in those enormous palaces which want a Semiramis or a Cleopatra. They were kind enough to make a fuss about me in London, but I never thought much of myself, and I am afraid I must feel rather dull to Piero, who is so brilliant himself, and has all kinds of talents.' _From the Countess of Cowes, Cowes House, London, to the Duchess of Dunne, Wavernake, Worcestershire._