But, with all its inconveniences, life was a charmingly entertaining game. In the faces of the children asleep, there was, besides sheer weariness, a youthfulness almost ridiculous. They might have been fourteen and fifteen. They were always young--very young--but when they slept they were as two twin babes. Their youth, their childhood, seemed somehow to obscure an aspect of them; there might have been also in it, to the sentimentalist, a touch of pity, and to the moralist a vague rising of dubious hope. Tommy, waking at a quarter-past two, stretched himself, yawned, and threw an empty cigarette-box into Betty's lap. 'Come to bed,' he said. CHAPTER II THE IMPRESSION-SEEKER Have you reckoned the landscape took substance and form that it might be painted in a picture? Or men and women that they might be written of, and songs sung? Or the attraction of gravity and the great laws and harmonious combinations and the fluids of the air as subjects for the savants? Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts? WALT WHITMAN. It was probable that Mrs. Venables came to Naples in order to absorb impressions. This was the business of her life; she made of herself a sponge, and let the waters of her experiences fill her. Later, she squeezed them out. It is admitted, of course, that any sponge will a little colour with its own individualities of hue the water which passes through it. She had really a fine power of discerning and appraising significance in matters the most ordinary. When all is said, to be easily 'struck' (her own word) must be accounted a gift, like any other of the manifold gifts of receptiveness. Mrs. Venables was struck--immensely struck--by the picturesque (her own word again) gaiety of the Toledo in the late November evening. Her walk through it was a veritable orgie to her. Her intelligent profile wore at moments a strained look; it was as if the impressions pressed in with almost too great a rapidity and force for capture. Capture was all she attempted; digestion might come later. The same anxious strain may be observed in the face of the gourmand confronted, he half fears, with more than his match. This anxiety perhaps takes the edge from entire enjoyment; but Mrs. Venables had not entered into life to receive pleasure, but impressions. It was all copy to her: the pedlars' stalls with their lights and groups of loafers, the unkempt men and women gutter-picking ('the _mozzonari_, Warren,' said Mrs. Venables, impressed), the people eating macaroni under the awnings of travelling cooks, the rag-sellers and the bone-buyers, and the general noisy sociability. It was all absorbed; it would all be squeezed forth in due time; nothing would be kept back, for the atmosphere of Southern Italy, so unique, depended on these details. 'Be truthful, and you will certainly be interesting,' was Mrs. Venables' theory of art; not at all 'Be interesting, and you may