“How queer the fashions are now,” she exclaimed, keenly interested, but with some disgust in her voice. “Are they really wearing such skirts in Florence? I think them ugly and immodest, fitting so closely round the hips. You have the Erskine figure, Joanna. Our women always had good, well-grown bodies. Turn round, and let me look at you. Yes, you are well set up, and have a good complexion like your mother, though she was never so pretty as you. But I had a fuller bosom at your age. A woman should be big-breasted, the Italian men say. And I think they are right.”

“Mother has sometimes said I am like you,” ventured Joanna, who hardly knew what to do with herself under her aunt’s scrutiny.

“Like me? Nonsense, child! Your mouth a little perhaps. Let me see? Yes, possibly a very little. But you have not, and never will have, my wonderful eyes. Have you ever seen eyes like mine? I have never met ay one who has. The young priest at Cammaiuola, our nearest village, whom I am helping and teaching, says my eyes seem always to be gazing straight into Heaven. Yours, Joanna, when they stop dreaming, will have the earthward gaze. I can see and feel it. No, don’t argue with me. Aunt Perdy knows these things. You will love with an earthly love, and you will suffer, as all those born in March must suffer, shedding tears that are sweeter than the smiles of others. But it is not yet clear if you will ever attain to the Universal, the Soul-love, which is mine. Why is it I can go about alone here without fear, at any hour of the night or day – here among these mountains where there are so many brutal men? It is because I have the perfect love which casteth out fear. If my bosom and my wonderful eyes were to fire a man’s passion, so that it entered his heart to do me a wrong, I should take him tenderly in my arms and give him freely all the love he is capable of taking. (Men are thirsting for such love, Joanna, though they may not be aware of it: and few women there are who have it to give.) Then he will go on his way a happier man. And when the fumes of wine or lust have gone from his brain he will know that he has been embraced by one whose soul is already in Heaven looking on the brightness of the Lamb, though her ageing body still walks the earth.”

As she spoke – almost chanting in her ecstasy – Aunt Perdy’s face grew more and more radiant, her eyes more madly luminous, till Joanna could not bear to look at her.