At Valescure we were within easy reach of Cannes, where the Actons were settled at the Villa Madeleine. The awkwardness of the trains prevented us from seeing as much of them as we had hoped; but I remember some pleasant walks and talks with Lord Acton, and especially the vehement advice he gave us, when my husband joined us and we started on a short, a very short, flight to Italy--for my husband had only a meager holiday from the _Times: "Go to Rome_! Never mind the journeys. Go! You will have three days there, you say? Well, to have walked through Rome, to have spent an hour in the Forum, another on the Palatine; to have seen the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's; to have climbed the Janiculum and looked out over the Alban hills and the Campagna--and you can do all that in three days--well!--life is not the same afterward. If you only had an afternoon in Rome it would be well worth while. But _three days_!" We laughed, took him at his word, and rushed on for Rome. And on the way we saw Perugia and Assisi for the first time, dipping into spring as soon as we got south of the Apennines, and tasting that intoxication of Italian sun in winter which turns northern heads. Of our week in Rome I remember only the first overwhelming impression--as of something infinitely old and _pagan_, through which Christianity moved about like a _parvenu_ amid an elder generation of phantom presences, already gray with time long before Calvary--that, and the making of a few new friends. Of these friends, one, who was to hold a lasting place in my admiration and love through after-years, shall be mentioned here--Contessa Maria Pasolini. Contessa Maria for some thirty years has played a great role in the social and intellectual history of Italy. She is the daughter of one of the leading business families of Milan, sister to the Marchese Ponti, who was for long Sindaco of that great city, and intimately concerned in its stormy industrial history. She married Count Pasolini, the head of an old aristocratic family with large estates in the Romagna, whose father was President of the first Senate of United Italy. It was in the neighborhood of the Pasolini estates that Garibaldi took refuge after 1848; and one may pass through them to reach the lonely hut in which Anita Garibaldi died.