'_September 15th_ (Schifanoja).--How tired I feel! The journey was rather fatiguing and the unaccustomed sea air makes my head ache at first. I need rest, and I already seem to have a foretaste of the sweetness of sleep and the happiness of awaking in the morning in the house of a friend and to the pleasures of Francesca's cordial hospitality at Schifanoja with its lovely roses and its tall cypress trees. I shall wake up to the knowledge that I have some weeks of peace before me--twenty days, perhaps even more, of congenial intellectual companionship. I am very grateful to Francesca for her invitation. To see her again was like meeting a sister. How much and how profoundly I have changed since the dear old days in Florence!
'Speaking to-day of my hair, Francesca began recalling stories of our absurd childish passions and melancholies in those days; of Carlotta Fiordelise and Gabriella Vanni and various incidents of that distant school life which seems to me now as though I had never lived it, but only read it of it in some old forgotten book or seen it in a dream. My hair has not fallen, but for every hair of my head there has been a thorn in my destiny.
'But why let my sad thoughts get the upper hand over me again? And why let memory cause me pain? It is useless to lament over a grave which never gives back its dead. Would to Heaven I could remember that, once for all!
'Francesca is still young, and has retained the frank and charming gaiety which, in our school days, exercised such a strange fascination over my somewhat gloomy temperament. She has one great and rare virtue: though she is light-hearted herself, she can enter into the troubles of others and knows how to lighten them by her kindly sympathy and pity. She is above all things a woman of high intelligence and refined tastes, a perfect hostess and a friend who never palls upon one. She is perhaps a trifle too fond of witty _mots_ and sparkling epigrams, but her darts are always tipped with gold, and she aims them with inimitable grace. Among all the women of the great world I have ever known there is certainly not one to compare with her, and of all my friends, she is the one I care for most.
'Her children are not like her, they are not handsome. But the youngest, Muriella, is a dear little thing, with the sweet laugh and the eyes of her mother. She did the honours of the house to Delfina with all the air of a little lady; she has certainly inherited her mother's perfect manner.