So he drifted northward with the spring, and saw the anemones blowing and the bloomy violet wonder the world, suffering incredible aching intimations of the recrudescence of desire. Afterward he came to Florence, where he had heard there were pictures, and hoped to have some peace; but at Florence they were all too busy being painted or prayed to, the remote Madonnas, the wounded Saints, the comfortable plump Venuses; the lean Christs too stupefied with candle smoke to take any account of an American gentleman in a plain business suit, who looked homely and ill and competent. Sometimes in Santa Croce or in the long gallery over the bridge, the noise of the city would remove from him and the faces would waver and lean out of their frames, as if, had the occasion allowed, they would have said the word to set him on his way. But there was always a guard about or a tourist stalking some uncatalogued prey and it never came to anything. "What you really want," said a man at his hotel to whom he had half whimsically complained of their inarticulateness--one of those remarkable individuals who had done nothing so successfully in so many cities of Europe that he was supposed to know the exact month for doing it most delightfully in any one of them--"what you really want is Venice. It's an off season there; you'll meet nobody but Germans, and if you go about in your own gondola you needn't mind them." So Peter went to Venice, and on the way there he met the Girl from Home. VI He knew at once that she was from Home, though as she sat opposite him with the fingers of her mended gloves laced under her chin and her face turned away to miss no point of the cypresses and warm, illumined walls, there was nothing to prove that any one of a hundred towns might not have produced her. Peter remembered what sort of people wore gloves like that in Bloombury--the minister's wife, the school teacher, his mother and Ellen--and was instantly sure she would not have been travelling through Italy first-class except at the instigation of the large, widowed and distrustful woman with whom she got on at Padua. This lady, also, Peter understood very well. He thought it likely she sat in rocking chairs a great deal at home and travelled to improve her mind. She had, moreover, a general air of proclaiming the unwarrantableness of railway acquaintances, which alone would have prevented Peter from asking the girl, as he absurdly wanted to, if they had painted the new school-house yet, and if there had been much water that year in Miller's pond. As she sat so with her round hat pushed askew by the window-glass, there was some delicate reminder about her that streaked the rich Italian landscape with vestiges of Bloombury.