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Updated: June 15, 2025
Wanda drives in the Cascine without me, and goes to the theater without me; she receives company, and the negress serves her. No one asks after me. I stray about the garden, irresolutely, like an animal that has lost its master. Lying among the bushes, I watch a couple of sparrows, fighting over a seed. Suddenly I hear the swish of a woman's dress.
A carriage passed before him through the Cascine gates, and drove down the road next the river. He followed, and when it had got a little way it stopped at the roadside, and a lady and little girl alighted, who looked about and caught sight of him, and then obviously waited for him to come up with them. It was Imogene and Effie Bowen, and the young girl called to him: "We thought it was you.
She was active, mentally and bodily, never giving up her multifarious reading, her letter-writing; never foregoing her invariable morning walk, in a big bonnet and the legendary red shawl, down the Lung Arno and into the Cascine.
Sometimes it is a troop of stout Franciscan friars, in sandals and brown robes, each carrying his staff and wearing a brown, broad-brimmed hat with a hemispherical crown. Sometimes it is a band of young theological students, in purple cassocks with red collars and cuffs, let out on a holiday, attended by their clerical instructors, to ramble in the Cascine.
From the window of the drawing-room Lavinia Sanviano could see, on the left, the Statue of Garibaldi, where the Corso Regina Maria cut into the Lungarno; on the right, and farther along, the gray-green foliage of the Cascine. Before her the Arno flowed away, sluggish and without a wrinkle or reflection on its turbid surface, into Tuscany.
In April it was summer weather; the drives of former days in the Cascine and to Bellosguardo, where a warm-hearted friend, Miss Isa Blagden, occupied a villa, were resumed.
Its green mildewed terraces and crumbling deities of fountain and ilex grove had no charm for her, and as a rule she and her friends preferred the crowded Lung'Arno and Cascine on the days when there was music, but this Thursday she had suggested that they should come across the river.
More might have been accomplished here. For in the matter of hill and dale and lake, and variety of vegetation, the Cascine are not remarkable. One calls to mind what has been attained at Kew Gardens in an identical situation, and with far less sunshine for the landscape gardener to play with.
That afternoon I spent the winter sunshine in the Cascine, the beautiful wood beside the Arno where the Florentines go each day for the passeggiata, either in their old-fashioned landaus with armorial bearings upon the panels, in modern motor-cars, or on foot. The afternoon, though it was winter, was glorious, even though the cold wind from the snow-tipped Apennines swept sharply down the valley.
Then the occupants of the open vehicles, and the equestrians, gather about the Eden Garden, in rows, six or eight deep, and listen to the popular airs, or chat merrily in the intervals. The Cascine at Florence, the Pincio at Rome, the Chiaja at Naples, the Prado at Madrid none of these famous drives can compare with the Maiden of Calcutta for gayety, variety, and attractiveness.
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