From Monte Rotondo, where the bridge had been blown up, we had to walk a
long distance, over bad roads, and were separated in the throng, but she
kept a place for me by her side. Thus I drove for the first time over
the Roman Campagna, by moonlight, with two brown eyes gazing into mine.
I felt as though I had met one of Sir Walter Scott's heroines, and won
her confidence at our first meeting.
XLI.
Vinnie Ream was by no means a Scott heroine, however, but a genuine
American, and doubly remarkable to me as being the first specimen of a
young woman from the United States with whom I became acquainted. Even
after I had seen a good deal of her work, I could not feel wholly
attracted by her talent, which sometimes expressed itself rather in a
pictorial than a plastic form, and had a fondness for emotional effects.
But she was a true artist, and a true woman, and I have never, in any
woman, encountered a will like hers. She was uninterruptedly busy.
Although, now that the time of her departure was so near, a few boxes
were steadily being packed every day at her home, she received every day
visits from between sixteen and twenty-five people, and she had so many
letters by post that I often found three or four unopened ones amongst
the visiting cards that had been left. Those were what she had
forgotten, and if she had read them, she had no time to reply to them.
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