It must be admitted that holding one's self to a belief
in Daisy's "innocence" came to seem to Winterbourne more and more a matter
of fine-spun gallantry. As I have already had occasion to relate, he was
angry at finding himself reduced to chopping logic about this young lady;
he was vexed at his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her
eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal.
From either view of them he had somehow missed her, and now it was too late.
She was "carried away" by Mr. Giovanelli.
A few days after his brief interview with her mother, he encountered
her in that beautiful abode of flowering desolation known as the
Palace of the Caesars. The early Roman spring had filled the air
with bloom and perfume, and the rugged surface of the Palatine
was muffled with tender verdure. Daisy was strolling along
the top of one of those great mounds of ruin that are embanked
with mossy marble and paved with monumental inscriptions.
It seemed to him that Rome had never been so lovely as just then.
He stood, looking off at the enchanting harmony of line and color
that remotely encircles the city, inhaling the softly humid odors,
and feeling the freshness of the year and the antiquity
of the place reaffirm themselves in mysterious interfusion.
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