The weather was warm and sunny. The colossal walls of ruined ancient palaces and shrines, that must surely have been built for giants, stood out in relief against the blue sky. The silence was intense, the Roman season had not yet begun. Unknown crowds of English travellers had not yet descended from the Swiss mountains, nor sailed across the waters from Egypt. Irene felt quite at home among the ruins. She wandered for days among the ruins of the Forum and the Palatine, trying to imagine the life of the past, when the sun shone down not on the crumbling stones before her but on a world of glistening marble and pagan luxury; when the immense sculptured gods, sheltered at present in the galleries of the Vatican, rose on their pedestals high above the heads of the gorgeous crowd with its classic draperies and its garlands of flowers, worshipping, offering sacrifices, burning incense. What a beautiful, gay, triumphant picture! Why did it all end? What could have driven these people away from their beloved green hills, down to the unhealthy banks of the Tiber and those dirty, dark alleys? And why are people now in their turn moving away from these alleys and returning to the hills and the sunshine, and a new, healthier life? For the first time the thought occurred to Irene that the world, like each individual human being, must gradually pass through all the different periods of life. First, the early years, with their faltering steps and their uncertain memory. Then, at about five years old, the beginning of gay, happy, early childhood, white raiment, crowns and garlands and flowers, dance and song and laughter and summer-time. Dolls are indispensable at this age—modelled of clay, hewn out of stone, carved in wood, at first very primitive and clumsy like those of the Egyptians, then always more and more lifelike, and finally perfected by the Greeks. And like a child who, having made itself a rag doll, takes it seriously and endows it with all sorts of qualities, so the Greeks and Romans place the gods they have made on pedestals, and call them Jupiter the terrible, Venus the passionate, Amor the little rogue, Minerva the wise, etc. They dance around their gods with the careless gaiety of childhood; they love gorgeous processions, banquets, chariot-racing, and gladiators’ fights for life or death, upon which they look with laughter, since pity is to them, as to all children, a thing unknown.