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Manisty advanced at his usual quick pace, his head sunk once more between his shoulders. Young Vitellucci approached him. 'Ah! Carlo! he said, looking up affectionately 'dear fellow! Come for a stroll with me. And linking his arm in the young man's, he carried him off. Their peals of laughter could be heard coming back from the distance of the ilex-walk.
In addition to which, when the garden is in the Italian manner, with flowers rather remarkably omitted, as too flimsy and easy and cheap, and without lawns that are too smart, paths that are too often swept and shrubs that are too closely trimmed, though with a fanciful formalism giving style to its shabbiness, and here and there a dusky ilex-walk, and here and there a dried-up fountain, and everywhere a piece of mildewed sculpture staring at you from a green alcove, and just in the right place, above all, a grassy amphitheatre curtained behind with black cypresses and sloping downward in mossy marble steps when, I say, the place possesses these attractions, and you lounge there of a soft Sunday afternoon, the racier spectacle of the streets having made your fellow-loungers few and left you to the deep stillness and the shady vistas that lead you wonder where, left you to the insidious irresistible mixture of nature and art, nothing too much of either, only a supreme happy resultant, a divine <i>tertium quid</i>: under these conditions, it need scarce be said the revelation invoked descends upon you.
We drove to Porta Angelica, the little gate hidden behind the right wing of Bernini's colonnade, and strolled thence up the winding road to the Villa Mellini, where one of the greasy peasants huddled under the wall in the sun admits you for half franc into the finest old ilex-walk in Italy. It is all vaulted grey-green shade with blue Campagna stretches in the interstices.
He would stand indeed with his hands on his sides, laughing and chatting with the boys, his head uncovered, his black curls blown backward from the great furrowed brow; and in the end Lucy peering from her nook would see him pacing up and down the ilex-walk with the priest, haranguing and gesticulating the old man in a pleased wonder looking at the Englishman through his spectacles, and throwing in from time to time ejaculations of assent, now half puzzled, and now fanatically eager.
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