fire below it was a dim and tempered warmth, like that of the churches
in which he and Undine sometimes took refuge at the height of the torrid
days.

Ralph loved the heavy Italian summer, as he had loved the light spring
days leading up to it: the long line of dancing days that had drawn them
on and on ever since they had left their ship at Naples four months
earlier. Four months of beauty, changeful, inexhaustible, weaving itself
about him in shapes of softness and strength; and beside him, hand in
hand with him, embodying that spirit of shifting magic, the radiant
creature through whose eyes he saw it. This was what their hastened
marriage had blessed them with, giving them leisure, before summer came,
to penetrate to remote folds of the southern mountains, to linger in the
shade of Sicilian orange-groves, and finally, travelling by slow stages
to the Adriatic, to reach the central hill-country where even in July
they might hope for a breathable air.

To Ralph the Sienese air was not only breathable but intoxicating. The
sun, treading the earth like a vintager, drew from it heady fragrances,
crushed out of it new colours. All the values of the temperate landscape
were reversed: the noon high-lights were whiter but the shadows had
unimagined colour. On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the
green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and
night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars.
Ralph said to himself that no one who had not seen Italy thus prostrate
beneath the sun knew what secret treasures she could yield.

As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive
felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface
of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated