She had dim, childish memories of magnificent things in her
father's house, though the main impression was that of his death,
following closely, as she had been told, upon her mother's. Of the
latter, she could remember nothing. In dreams she saw beautiful things,
and brilliant light and splendid pictures and enchanted gardens, and
when she awoke she felt that the dreams had been recollections of what
she had seen, and of what still belonged to her. But she sought the
reality in vain. The grand old palace in the Toledo was hers, she was
told, but it was let for a term of years to the municipality and was
filled with public offices; the marble staircases were black and dingy
with the passing of many feet that tracked in the mud in winter and the
filthy dust of Naples in summer. Dark, poor faces and ill-clad forms
moved through the halls, and horrible voices echoed perpetually in the
corridors, where those who waited discussed taxes, and wrangled, and
cursed those in power, and cheated one another, and picked a pocket now
and then, and spat upon the marble pavement whereon royal and lordly
feet had so often trod in days gone by. It had all become a great nest
of dirt and stealing and busy chicanery, where dingy, hawk-eyed men with
sodden white faces and disgusting hands lay in wait for the unwary who
had business with the city government, to rob them on pretence of
facilitating their affairs, to cringe for a little coin flung them in
scorn sometimes by one who had grown rich in greater robbery than they
could practise--sometimes, too, springing aside to escape a kick or a
blow as ill-tempered success went swinging by, high-handed and vulgarly
cruel, a few degrees less filthy and ten thousand times more repulsive.
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