To the very end she maintained the fiction that she was my foster-mother, responsible to my parents for my advancement in education and morals. Assuredly she taught me her tongue and kept me out of gross iniquity; but equally certain is it that I learned more than Italian. I learned, however, to be very fluent in that, for, inspired by love of Aurelia, I attacked it with extraordinary passion. All Italy, and above all Tuscany, took sacred air from her; there grew to be an aureole about everything which owned kinship with her. I was a severe ritualist, as every lover is: it became a blasphemy in me to think of Aurelia in any form of words but those of her own honey tongue. And that was of the purest in the land. She had very little Venetian at any time, and kept what she had for her husband and household management. To me she employed her native speech, not the harsh staccato of Florence, a stringent compound of the throat and the teeth, but the silken caressing liquids of Siena, the speech of women to their lovers, of St. Catherine to her Spouse. So I became expert in Tuscan, and after the same fashion in Tuscany also. She was deeply and burningly proud of that land of art and letters; she knew something of its history, something (if not much) of its monuments. Such as it was it sufficed me. Inspired by her, I began the study of literature, and if at first I read disingenuously, I went on to read with profit. The "Vita Nova" of Dante enabled me, perhaps, to touch upon topics with her which I could not have dared to do without its moving text; but it won me to the heart of the great poet. I walked the dire circles of Hell, I scaled the Mount of Purgatory, I flew from ring to ring of the Heaven of pure light. Aurelia was my Beatrice; but the great Florentine and his lady were necessarily of the party. And then I began, as men will, to take the lead. Aurelia had exhausted her little store when she had named Giotto and Dante: I took her further afield. We read the Commentaries of Villani, Malavolti's History of Siena, the Triumphs of Petrarch, his Sonnets (fatal pap for young lovers), the Prince of Machiavelli, the Epics of Pulci and Bojardo, and Ariosto's dangerously honeyed pages. Here Aurelia was content to follow me, and I found teaching her to be as sweet in the mouth as learning of her had been. I took enormous pains and consumed half the night in preparation for the morrow's work. I abridged Guicciardini's intolerable History, I hacked sense out of Michael Angelo's granite verses, weeded Lorenzo of disgustfulness, Politian of pedantry. The last thing we read together was the Aminta of Tasso; the last thing I had of her was the "Little Flowers of St. Francis," a favourite book of her devotion. My Saint, she called St. Francis of Assisi--as in one sense no doubt he was; but, "Aurelia," I had replied, kissing both her hands, "you know very well who is my saint. I should have been named Aurelius." She had said, "It is a good name, Aurelio.