The merest trifles, in such weather, with a pretty new-found Cousin Rosalys for a comrade, are delightful, when one is eighteen, aren’t they? It was delightful to feel the yielding turf under our feet, the cool grass curling round our ankles—for in Roman gardens, in those old days, it wasn’t the fashion to clip the grass close, as on an English lawn. It was delightful to walk in the shade of the orange-trees, and breathe the air sweetened by them. The stillness the dreamy stillness of the soft, sunny afternoon was delightful; the crumbling old statues were delightful, statues of fauns and dryads, of Pagan gods and goddesses, Pan and Bacchus and Diana, their noses broken for the most part, their bodies clothed in mosses and leafy vines. And the flowers were delightful; the cyclamens, with which—so abundant were they—the walls of the garden fairly dripped, as with a kind of pink foam; and the roses, and the waxen red and white camellias. It was delightful to stop before the great brown old fountain, and listen to its tinkle-tinkle of cold water, and peer into its basin, all green with weeds, and watch the antics of the goldfishes, and the little rainbows the sun struck from the spray. And my Cousin Rosalys’s white frock was delightful, and her voice was delightful; and that perturbation in my heart was exquisitely delightful—something between a thrill and a tremor—a delicious mixture of fear and wonderment and beatitude. I had dragged myself hither to pay a duty-call upon my grim old dragon of a great-aunt Elizabeth; and here I was wandering amid the hundred delights of a romantic Italian garden, with a lovely, white-robed, bright-eyed sylph of a Cousin Rosalys. Don’t ask me what we talked about. I have only the most fragmentary recollection. I remember she told me that her father and mother had died in India, when she was a child, and that her father (Aunt Elizabeth’s “ever so much younger brother”) had been in the army, and that she had lived with Aunt Elizabeth since she was twelve. And I remember she asked me to speak French with her, because in Rome she almost always spoke Italian or English, and she didn’t want to forget her French; and “You’re, of course, almost a Frenchman, living in Paris.” So we spoke French together, saying ma cousine and mon cousin, which was very intimate and pleasant; and she spoke it so well that I expressed some surprise. “If you don’t put on at least a slight accent, I shall tell you you’re almost a Frenchman too,” I threatened. “Oh, I had French nurses when I was little,” she said, “and afterwards a French governess, till I was sixteen. I’m eighteen now. How old are you?” I had heard that girls always liked a man to be older than themselves, and I answered that I was nearly twenty. Well, and isn’t eighteen nearly twenty?.... Anyhow, as I walked back to my lodgings that afternoon, through the busy, twisted, sunlit Roman streets, Cousin Rosalys filled all my heart and all my thoughts with a white radiance.