The Swiss, flourishing his staff of office, marshalled me (I can’t use a less imposing word for the ceremony) slowly, solemnly, across a courtyard, and up a great stone staircase, at the top of which he handed me on to a functionary in black—a functionary with an ominously austere countenance, like an usher to the Inquisition. Poor old Archimede! Later, when I had come to know him well and tip him, I found he was the mildest creature, the amiablest, the most obliging, and that tenebrious mien of his only a congenital accident, like a lisp or a club-foot. But for the present he dismayed me, and I surrendered myself with humility and meekness to his guardianship. He conducted me through a series of vast chambers—you know those enormous, ungenial Roman rooms, their sombre tapestried walls, their formal furniture, their cheerless, perpetual twilight—and out upon a terrace. The terrace lay in full sunshine. There was a garden below it, a garden with orange-trees, and rosebushes, and camellias, with stretches of greensward, with shrubberies, with a great fountain plashing in the midst of it, and broken, moss-grown statues: a Roman garden, from which a hundred sweet airs came up, in the gentle Roman weather. The balustrade of the terrace was set at intervals with flowering plants, in big urn-shaped vases; I don’t remember what the flowers were, but they were pink, and many of their petals had fallen, and lay scattered on the grey terrace pavement. At the far end, under an awning brave with red and yellow stripes, two ladies were seated—a lady in black, presumably the object of my pious pilgrimage; and a lady in white, whom, even from a distance, I discovered to be young and pretty. A little round table stood between them, with a carafe of water and some tumblers glistening crisply on it. The lady in black was fanning herself with a black lace fan. The lady in white held a book in her hand, from which I think she had been reading aloud. A tiny imp of a red Pomeranian dog had started forward, and was barking furiously. This scene must have made a deeper impression upon my perceptions than any that I was conscious of at the moment, because it has always remained as fresh in my memory as you see it now. It has always been a picture that I could turn to when I would, and find unfaded: the garden, the blue sky, the warm September sunshine, the long terrace, and the two ladies seated at the end of it, looking towards me, an elderly lady in black, and a young lady in white, with dark hair. My aunt quieted Sandro (that was the dog’s name), and giving me her hand, said “How do you do?” rather drily. And then, for what seemed a terribly long time, though no doubt it was only a few seconds, she kept me standing before her, while she scrutinised me through a double eye-glass, which she held by a mother-of-pearl handle; and I was acutely aware of the awkward figure I must be cutting to the vision of that strange young lady.