 too, her rival! - the
land of France, personified by her instinctively, though she had no vivid
imaginative gift, did not wound her with a poisoned dart. - »She knew him first:
she was his first love.« The Alps, and the sense of having Italy below them,
renewed Cecilia's lofty-perching youth. Then - I am in Italy! she sighed with
rapture. The wine of delight and oblivion was at her lips.
    But thirst is not enjoyment, and a satiated thirst that we insist on
over-satisfying to drown the recollection of past anguish, is baneful to the
soul. In Rome Cecilia's vision of her track to Rome was of a run of fire over a
heath. She could scarcely feel common pleasure in Rome. It seemed burnt out.
    Flung back on herself, she was condemned to undergo the bitter torment she
had flown from: jealous love, and reproachful; and a shame in it like nothing
she had yet experienced. Previous pains were but Summer lightnings, passing
shadows. She could have believed in sorcery: - the man had eaten her heart!
    A disposition to mocking humour, foreign to her nature, gave her the notion
of being off her feet, in the claws of a fabulous bird. It served to veil her
dulness. An ultra-English family in Rome, composed, shocking to relate, of a
baronet banker and his wife, two faint-faced girls, and a young gentleman of our
country, once perhaps a light-limbed boy, chose to be followed by their footman
in the melancholy pomp of state livery. Wherever she encountered them Cecilia
talked Nevil Beauchamp. Even Mr. Tuckham perceived it. She was extremely
uncharitable: she extended her ungenerous criticism to the institution of the
footman: England, and the English, were lashed.
    »Those people are caricatures,« Tuckham said, in apology for poor England
burlesqued abroad. »You must not generalize on them. Footmen are footmen all the
world over. The cardinals have a fine set of footmen.«
    »They are at home. Those English sow contempt of us all over Europe. We
cannot but be despised. One comes abroad foredoomed to share the sentiment. This
is your middle-class! What society can they move in, that sanctions a vulgarity
so perplexing? They have the air of ornaments on a cottager's parlour
mantelpiece.«
    Tuckham laughed. »Something of that,« he said.
    »Evidently they seek distinction, and they have it, of that kind,« she
continued. »It is
