But just one or two faces stood the test, and were justified:  a young man oppressed with the burden of youth; a sweet, toothless grandmother in a bonnet, wearing old age like a flower; a woman not beautiful but for her neck which carried indignation; her face had a thwarted look.  “Dead and rotten” one did not say of these in disgust and involuntarily as one did of the others.  And yet I don’t suppose the eye picks out the faces that kindled most kindness round them when living, or that one can see well at all where one sees without sympathy.  I think the Mother-Aunt’s face would not look dear to most people as it does to me,—­yet my sight of her is the truer:  only I would not put it up on a tombstone in order that it might look nothing to those that pass by.

I wrote this much, and then, leaving the M.-A. to glory in her innumerable correspondence, Arthur and I went off to the lake, where we have been for about seven hours.  On it, I found it become infinitely more beautiful, for everything was mystified by a lovely bloomy haze, out of which the white peaks floated like dreams:  and the mountains change and change, and seem not all the same as going when returning.  Don’t ask me to write landscape to you:  one breathes it in, and it is there ever after, but remains unset to words.

The T——­s whittle themselves out of our company just to the right amount:  come back at the right time (which is more than Arthur and I are likely to do when our legs get on the spin), and are duly welcome with a diversity of doings to talk about.  Their tastes are more the M.-A.’s, and their activities about halfway between hers and ours, so we make rather a fortunate quintette.  The M——­ trio join us the day after to-morrow, when the majority of us will head away at once to Florence.  Arthur growls and threatens he means to be left behind for a week:  and it suits the funny little jealousy of the M.-A. well enough to see us parted for a time, quite apart from the fact that I shall then be more dependent on her company.  She will then glory in overworking herself,—­say it is me; and I shall feel a fiend.  No letter at all, dearest, this; merely talky-talky.—­Yours without words.

LETTER XXX.

Dearest:  I cannot say I have seen Pisa, for the majority had their way, and we simply skipped into it, got ourselves bumped down at the Duomo and Campo Santo for two hours, fell exhausted to bed, and skipped out again by the first train next morning.  Over the walls of the Campo Santo are some divine crumbs of Benozzo Gozzoli (don’t expect me ever to spell the names of dead painters correctly:  it is a politeness one owes to the living, but the famous dead are exalted by being spelt phonetically as the heart dictates, and become all the better company for that greatest of unspelled and spread-about names—­Shakspere, Shakspeare, Shakespeare—­his mark, not himself).  Such a long parenthesis requires stepping-stones to carry you over it:  “crumbs” was the last (wasn’t a whole loaf of bread a stepping-stone in one of Andersen’s fairy-tales?):  but, indeed, I hadn’t time to digest them properly.  Let me come back to them before I die, and bury me in that inclosure if you love me as much then as I think you do now.