her soul was in her possessions! I stood and watched her. Then she went
into the road and under the trees, haughty, a demoiselle. She had on
white kid boots.
I thought of the Lake of Como what I had thought of Lugano: it must have
been wonderful when the Romans came there. Now it is all villas. I think
only the sunrise is still wonderful, sometimes.
I took the steamer down to Como, and slept in a vast old stone cavern of
an inn, a remarkable place, with rather nice people. In the morning I
went out. The peace and the bygone beauty of the cathedral created the
glow of the great past. And in the market-place they were selling
chestnuts wholesale, great heaps of bright, brown chestnuts, and sacks
of chestnuts, and peasants very eager selling and buying. I thought of
Como, it must have been wonderful even a hundred years ago. Now it is
cosmopolitan, the cathedral is like a relic, a museum object, everywhere
stinks of mechanical money-pleasure. I dared not risk walking to Milan:
I took a train. And there, in Milan, sitting in the Cathedral Square, on
Saturday afternoon, drinking Bitter Campari and watching the swarm of
Italian city-men drink and talk vivaciously, I saw that here the life
was still vivid, here the process of disintegration was vigorous, and
centred in a multiplicity of mechanical activities that engage the human
mind as well as the body. But always there was the same purpose stinking
in it all, the mechanizing, the perfect mechanizing of human life.
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