Mr. Floyd was her partner. She liked music, but how much better
tennis seemed. How much better to run about in comfortable
clothes than to sit at the piano and feel girt under the arms.
Once more music appeared to her the employment of a child. George
served, and surprised her by his anxiety to win. She remembered
how he had sighed among the tombs at Santa Croce because things
wouldn't fit; how after the death of that obscure Italian he had
leant over the parapet by the Arno and said to her: "I shall want
to live, I tell you," He wanted to live now, to win at tennis, to
stand for all he was worth in the sun--the sun which had begun to
decline and was shining in her eyes; and he did win.
Ah, how beautiful the Weald looked! The hills stood out above its
radiance, as Fiesole stands above the Tuscan Plain, and the South
Downs, if one chose, were the mountains of Carrara. She might be
forgetting her Italy, but she was noticing more things in her
England. One could play a new game with the view, and try to find
in its innumerable folds some town or village that would do for
Florence.
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