A Gentleman’s Tour

In a long, pillared portico, where everything was white and light save the blue of the great bay as it played up from far below or as you took it in, between shining columns, with your elbows on the parapet. Sorrento and Vesuvius were over against you; Naples furthest off, melted, in the middle of the picture, into shimmering vagueness and innocence…

The white arcades and the cool chambers offered to every step some sweet old “piece” of the past, some rounded porphyry pillar supporting a bust, some shaft of pale alabaster upholding a trellis, some mutilated marble image, some bronze that had roughly resisted…

…My friend had, among many original relics, in one of his white galleries–and how he understood the effect and the “value” of whiteness!–two or three reproductions of the finest bronzes of the Naples museum, the work of a small band of brothers whom