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An enormous sky of the most delicate blue arched overhead.

In her mind's eye -- her imagination responding fully, almost exhaustingly, to these shores' peculiar powers of stimulation -- she saw the city as from above, telescoped on its great bare plains that the ruins marked, aqueducts and tombs, here a cypress, there a pine, and all around the low blue hills.

Pictures in old Latin books returned to her: the Appian Way Today, the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine.

She would see them, looking just as they had in the books, and this would make up a part of her delight.

Moreover, nursing various Stubblefields -- her aunt, then her mother, then her father -- through their lengthy illnesses ( everybody could tell you the Stubblefields were always sick ), Theresa had had a chance to read quite a lot.

England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy had all been rendered for her time and again, and between the prescribed hours of pills and tonics, she had conceived a dreamy passion by lamplight, to see all these places with her own eyes.

The very night after her father's funeral she had thought, though never admitted to a soul: Now I can go.

There's nothing to stop me now.

So here it was, here was Italy, anyway, and terribly noisy.