A field-worn woman, filthy and
dishevelled, drove back half a dozen nearly naked children whose little
legs were crusted with dry mud, and whose faces had not been washed for
a long time.
And within, there was no furniture. In the rooms upstairs were stores of
grain and potatoes, and red peppers and grapes hanging on strings. The
cracked mirrors, built into the gilded stucco, were coated with heavy
unctuous dust, and the fine old painted tiles on the floor were loose
and broken in places. In the ceiling certain pink and well-fed cherubs
still supported unnatural thunderclouds through which Juno forever drove
her gold-wheeled car and team of patient peacocks, smiling high and
goddess-like at the squalor beneath. Still Diana bent over Endymion
cruelly foreshortened in his sleep, beyond the possibility of a waking
return to human proportions. Mars frowned, Jove threatened, Venus rose
glowing from the sea; and below, the unctuous black dust settled and
thickened on everything except the cracked floors piled with maize and
beans and lupins, and rubbed bright between the heaps by the peasants'
naked feet.
Veronica turned her back upon the villa, as she had turned from the
great palace in the Toledo. They whispered to her that the peasant's
rent must not be reduced, for he was well able to pay, and they pointed
to the closely planted vines and vegetables and olives that stretched
far away to right and left, where she remembered in her dreams of far
childhood that there had been lawns and walks and flowers.
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