At last, “I should never have recognised you. As a child you were the image of your father. Now you resemble your mother,” Aunt Elizabeth declared; and lowering her glass, she added, “This is your cousin Rosalys.” I wondered, as I made my bow, why I had never heard before that I had such a pretty cousin, with such a pretty name. She smiled on me very kindly, and I noticed how bright her eyes were, and how white and delicate her face. The little blue veins showed through the skin, and there was no more than just the palest, palest thought of colour in her cheeks. But her lips—exquisitely curved, sensitive lips—were warm red. She smiled on me very kindly, and I daresay my heart responded with an instant palpitation. She was a girl, and she was pretty; and her name was Rosalys; and we were cousins; and I was eighteen. And above us glowed the blue sky of Italy, and round us the golden sunshine; and there, beside the terrace, lay the beautiful old Roman garden, the fragrant, romantic garden.... If at eighteen one isn’t susceptible and sentimental and impetuous, and prepared to respond with an instant sweet commotion to the smiles of one’s pretty cousins (especially when they’re named Rosalys), I protest one is unworthy of one’s youth. One might as well be thirty-five, and a literary hack in London. After that introduction, however, my aunt immediately reclaimed my attention. She proceeded to ask me all sorts of questions, about myself, about my people, uninteresting questions, disconcerting questions, which she posed with the air of one who knew the answers beforehand, and was only asking as an examiner asks, to test you. And all the while, the expression of her face, of her deprecating straight-lipped mouth, of her half-closed sceptical old eyes, seemed to imply that she already had her opinion of me, and that it wouldn’t in the least be affected by anything I could say for myself, and that it was distinctly not a flattering opinion. “Well, and what brings you to Rome?” That was one of her questions. I felt like a suspicious character haled before the local magistrate to give an account of his presence in the parish; putting on the best face I could, I pleaded superior orders. I had taken my baccalauréat in the summer; and my father desired me to pass some months in Italy, for the purpose of “patching up my Italian, which had suffered from the ravages of time,” before I returned to Paris, and settled down to the study of a profession. “H’m,” said she, manifesting no emotion at what (in my simplicity) I deemed rather a felicitous metaphor; and then, as it were, she let me off with a warning. “Look out that you don’t fall into bad company. Rome is full of dangerous people—painters, Bohemians, republicans, atheists. You must be careful. I shall keep my eye upon you.”