and the parroco, and the parroco’s Masses and Benedictions—­to-day, he would please himself by fancying, might be a yesterday of long ago that had somehow dropped out of the calendar and remained, a fragment of the Past that had been forgotten and left over.  The presence of a person of his own sort, a fellow citizen of his own period, wearing its clothes, speaking its speech, would have broken the charm, would have seemed as undesirable and as inappropriate as the introduction of an English meadow into the Italian landscape.

Yet now such a person had come, and behold, her presence, so far from breaking the charm, merged with and intensified it,—­supplied indeed the one feature needed to perfect it.  A person of his own sort?  The expression is convenient.  A fellow citizen, certainly, of his period, wearing its clothes, speaking its speech.  But a person, happily, not of his own sex, a woman, a beautiful woman; and what her presence supplied to the poetry of Sant’ Alessina, making it complete, was, if you like, the Eternal Feminine.  As supplied already by the painted women on the walls about him, this force had been static; as supplied by a woman who lived and breathed, it became dynamic.  That was all very well; if he could have let it rest at that, if he could have confined his interest in her, his feeling about her, to the plane of pure aesthetics, he would have had nothing to complain of.  But the mischief was that he couldn’t.  The thing that perplexed and annoyed him,—­and humiliated him too, in some measure,—­was a craving that had sprung up over-night, and was now strong and constant, to get into personal touch with her, to make her acquaintance, to talk with her; to find out a little what manner of soul she had, to establish some sort of human relation with her.  It wasn’t in the least as yet a sentimental craving; or, if it was, John at any rate didn’t know it.  In its essence, perhaps, it was little more than curiosity.  But it was disturbing, upsetting, it destroyed the peace and the harmonious leisure of his day.  It perplexed him, it was outside his habits, it was unreasonable.  “Not unreasonable to think it might be fun to talk to a pretty woman,” he discriminated, “but unreasonable to yearn to talk to her as if your life hung in the balance.”  And in some measure, too, it humiliated him:  it was a confession of weakness, of insufficiency to himself, of dependence for his contentment upon another.  He tried to stifle it; he tried to fix his mind on subjects that would lead far from it.  Every subject, all subjects, subjects the most discrepant, seemed to possess one common property, that of leading straight back to it.  Then he said, “Well, if you can’t stifle it, yield to it.  Go down into the garden—­hunt her up—­boldly engage her in conversation.”  Assurance was the note of the man; but when he pictured himself in the act of “boldly engaging her in conversation,” his assurance oozed away, and he was conscious of a thrice-humiliating shyness.  Why?  What was there in the woman that should turn a brave man shy?