Momma says there is only one thing she recollects clearly about San Lorenzo, and that is the Chapel of St. John the Baptist.  This does not remain in her memory because of the Cinquecento screen or the altar-canopy’s porphyry pillars which we know we must have seen because the guide-book says they are there, but because of the fact that Pope Innocent the Eighth had it closed to our sex for a long time, except on one day of the year, on account of Herodias.  Momma considered this extremely invidious of Innocent the Eighth, and said it was a thing no man except a Pope would have thought of doing.  What annoyed poppa was that she seemed to hold Alessandro Bebbini responsible, and covered him with reproaches, in the guise of argument, which he neither deserved nor understood.  And when poppa suggested that she was probably as much to blame for Herodias’s conduct as Mr. Bebbini was for the Pope’s, she said that had nothing whatever to do with it, and she thanked Heaven she was born a Protestant anyway, distinctly implying that Herodias was a Roman Catholic.  And if poppa didn’t wish her back to give out altogether, would he please return to the carriage.

We wandered through a palace or two and thought how interesting it must have been to be rich in the days of “Sir Horatio Palavasene, who robbed the Pope to pay the Queen.”  Wealth had its individuality in those days, and expressed itself with truth and splendour in sculpture, and picture, and tapestry, and precious things, with the picturesqueness of contrast and homage.  As the Senator said, a banquet hall did not then suggest a Fifth Avenue hairdresser’s saloon.  But now the Genoese merchant-princes would find that their state had lost its identity in machine made imitations, and that it would be more distinguished to be poor, since poverty is never counterfeited.  But poppa declined to go as far as that.

Alessandro, as we drove round and up the winding roads that take one to the top of Genoa—­the hotels and the palaces and the churches are mostly at the bottom—­was full of joyous and rapid information.  Especially did he continue to be communicative on the subject of Christopher Columbus, and if we are not now assured of the school that discoverer attended in his youth, and the altar rails before which he took the first communion of his early manhood, and the occupation of his wife’s parents, and many other matters concerning him, it is the fault of history and not that of Alessandro Bebbini.  After a cathedral and a palace and a long drive, this was bound to have its effect, and I very soon saw resentment in the demeanour of both my parents.  So much so, that when we passed the family group in memory of Mazzini, and Alessandro explained dramatically that “the daughter he sitta down and cryo because his father is a-dead,” poppa said, “Is that so?” without the faintest show of excitement, and momma declined even to look round.