Molly was a handsome fool.... She lacked the historic sense; and if she thought of Rome at all, supposed it a collocation of warehouses, jetties, and a church or two--an unfamiliar Wapping upon a river with a long name. Maurice Hewlett’s heroine had known only Wapping and Wapping was her world. She could not think of Rome as being, so to speak, the blossom of another sort of tree--a place where the very sky looked different; but she must take Wapping as the pattern of things. Her untravelled mind could not see that Life as it strikes through the Earth, crystallising into towns and cities and breaking out in buildings and fashions and thoughts, is one thing here and another thing there, and ever finds fresh forms for its expression like an artist in his moods. Molly could not dream that all history--and, behind history, geography--had conspired to make Rome a different picture, a different mood, from the Wapping she had known. She “lacked the historic sense.” It was not that the warehouses of Rome might be different from those of Wapping, or its churches bigger, or all these set out in an unfamiliar way; it would have been wrong if it had been possible to think of Rome as an unfamiliar Wapping, without warehouses, jetties and churches, all. The truth was that Rome was one poem, and Wapping was another poem; and each was the clothing of a Life. Each was a personality; in a way, a world in itself. Each had that sort of one-ness and identity which gave it an “atmosphere” of its own.