She replied to them with a superabundance of
sound sense and dismissed them with a jest.
One day that I went to fetch her to the Casino Borghese, I found her
dissolved in tears. One of the two beautiful doves who flew about the
house and perched on her shoulders, and which she had brought with her
from Washington, had disappeared in the night. At first I thought that
her distress was half jest, but nothing could have been more real; she
was beside herself with grief. I realised that if philologians have
disputed as to how far Catullus' poem of the girl's grief over the dead
sparrow were jest or earnest, it was because they had never seen a girl
weep over a bird. Catullus, perhaps, makes fun a little of the grief,
but the grief itself, in his poem too, is serious enough.
In the lovely gardens of the Villa Borghese, Vinnie Ream's melancholy
frame of mind was dispersed, and we sat for a long time by one of the
handsome fountains and talked, among other things, of our pleasure in
being together, which pleasure was not obscured by the prospect of
approaching parting, because based only on good-fellowship, and with no
erotic element about it. Later in the evening, she had forgotten her
sorrow altogether in the feverish eagerness with which she worked, and
she kept on, by candle-light, until three o'clock in the morning.
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