All the romance of Katy's nature responded to the fascination of the ancient city,—the capital of the world, as it may truly be called.
The shortest drive or walk brought them face to face with innumerable and unexpected delights.
Now it was a wonderful fountain, with plunging horses and colossal nymphs and Tritons, holding cups and horns from which showers of white foam rose high in air to fall like rushing rain into an immense marble basin.
Now it was an arched doorway with traceries as fine as lace,—sole-remaining fragment of a heathen temple, flung and stranded as it were by the waves of time on the squalid shore of the present.
Now it was a shrine at the meeting of three streets, where a dim lamp burned beneath the effigy of the Madonna, with always a fresh rose beside it in a vase, and at its foot a peasant woman kneeling in red bodice and blue petticoat, with a lace-trimmed towel folded over her hair.
Or again it would be a sunlit terrace lifted high on a hillside, and crowded with carriages full of beautifully dressed people, while below all Rome seemed spread out like a panorama, dim, mighty, majestic, and bounded by the blue wavy line of the Campagna and the Alban hills.
Or perhaps it might be a wonderful double flight of steps with massive balustrades and pillars with urns, on which sat a crowd of figures in strange costumes and attitudes, who all looked as though they had stepped out of pictures, but who were in reality models waiting for artists to come by and engage them.
No matter what it was,—a bit of oddly tinted masonry with a tuft of brown and orange wallflowers hanging upon it, or a vegetable stall where endive and chiccory and curly lettuces were arranged in wreaths with tiny orange gourds and scarlet peppers for points of color,—it was all Rome, and, by virtue of that word, different from any other place,—more suggestive, more interesting, ten times more mysterious than any other could possibly be, so Katy thought.
This fact consoled her for everything and anything,—for the fleas, the dirt, for the queer things they had to eat and the still queerer odors they were forced to smell!
Nothing seemed of any particular consequence except the deep sense of enjoyment, and the newly discovered world of thought and sensation of which she had become suddenly conscious.
The only drawback to her happiness, as the days went on, was that little Amy did not seem quite well or like herself.
She had taken a cold on the journey from Naples, and though it did not seem serious, that, or something, made her look pale and thin.
Her mother said she was growing fast, but the explanation did not quite account for the wistful look in the child's eyes and the tired feeling of which she continually complained.
Mrs. Ashe, with vague uneasiness, began to talk of cutting short their Roman stay and getting Amy off to the more bracing air of Florence.
But meanwhile there was the Carnival close at hand, which they must by no means lose; and the feeling that their opportunity might be a brief one made her and Katy all the more anxious to make the very most of their time.
So they filled the days full with sights to see and things to do, and came and went; sometimes taking Amy with them, but more often leaving her at the hotel under the care of a kind German chambermaid, who spoke pretty good English and to whom Amy had taken a fancy.
"The marble things are so cold, and the old broken things make me so sorry," she explained; "and I hate beggars because they are dirty, and the stairs make my back ache; and I'd a great deal rather stay with Maria and go up on the roof, if you don't mind, mamma."
This roof, which Amy had chosen as a playplace, covered the whole of the great hotel, and had been turned into a sort of upper-air garden by the simple process of gravelling it all over, placing trellises of ivy here and there, and setting tubs of oranges and oleanders and boxes of gay geraniums and stock-gillyflowers on the balustrades.
A tame fawn was tethered there.
Amy adopted him as a playmate; and what with his company and that of the flowers, the times when her mother and Katy were absent from her passed not unhappily.
Katy always repaired to the roof as soon as they came in from their long mornings and afternoons of sight-seeing.
Years afterward, she would remember with contrition how pathetically glad Amy always was to see her.
She would put her little head on Katy's breast and hold her tight for many minutes without saying a word. When she did speak it was always about the house and the garden that she talked.
She never asked any questions as to where Katy had been, or what she had done; it seemed to tire her to think about it.
"I should be very lonely sometimes if it were not for my dear little fawn," she told Katy once.
"He is so sweet that I don't miss you and mamma very much while I have him to play with.
I call him Florio,—don't you think that is a pretty name?
I like to stay with him a great deal better than to go about with you to those nasty-smelling old churches, with fleas hopping all over them!"
So Amy was left in peace with her fawn, and the others made haste to see all they could before the time came to go to Florence.
Katy realized one of the "moments" for which she had come to Europe when she stood for the first time on the balcony overhanging the Corso, which Mrs. Ashe had hired in company with some acquaintances made at the hotel, and looked down at the ebb and surge of the just-begun Carnival.
The narrow street seemed humming with people of all sorts and conditions.
Some were masked; some were not.
There were ladies and gentlemen in fashionable clothes, peasants in the gayest costumes, surprised-looking tourists in tall hats and linen dusters, harlequins, clowns, devils, nuns, dominoes of every color,—red, white, blue, black; while above, the balconies bloomed like a rose-garden with pretty faces framed in lace veils or picturesque hats.
Flowers were everywhere, wreathed along the house-fronts, tied to the horses' ears, in ladies' hands and gentlemen's button-holes, while venders went up and down the street bearing great trays of violets and carnations and camellias for sale.
The air was full of cries and laughter, and the shrill calls of merchants advertising their wares,—candy, fruit, birds, lanterns, and confetti, the latter being merely lumps of lime, large or small, with a pea or a bean embedded in each lump to give it weight.
Boxes full of this unpleasant confection were suspended in front of each balcony, with tin scoops to use in ladling it out and flinging it about.
Everybody wore or carried a wire mask as protection against this white, incessant shower; and before long the air became full of a fine dust which hung above the Corso like a mist, and filled the eyes and noses and clothes of all present with irritating particles.
Pasquino's Car was passing underneath just as Katy and Mrs. Ashe arrived,—a gorgeous affair, hung with silken draperies, and bearing as symbol an enormous egg, in which the Carnival was supposed to be in act of incubation.
A huge wagon followed in its wake, on which was a house some sixteen feet square, whose sole occupant was a gentleman attended by five servants, who kept him supplied with confetti, which he showered liberally on the heads of the crowd.
Then came a car in the shape of a steamboat, with a smoke-pipe and sails, over which flew the Union Jack, and which was manned with a party wearing the dress of British tars.
The next wagon bore a company of jolly maskers equipped with many-colored bladders, which they banged and rattled as they went along.
Following this was a troupe of beautiful circus horses, cream-colored with scarlet trappings, or sorrel with blue, ridden by ladies in pale green velvet laced with silver, or blue velvet and gold.
Another car bore a bird-cage which was an exact imitation of St. Peter's, within which perched a lonely old parrot.
This device evidently had a political signification, for it was alternately hissed and applauded as it went along.
The whole scene was like a brilliant, rapidly shifting dream; and Katy, as she stood with lips apart and eyes wide open with wonderment and pleasure, forgot whether she was in the body or not,—forgot everything except what was passing before her gaze.
She was roused by a stinging shower of lime-dust.
An Englishman in the next balcony had take courteous advantage of her preoccupation, and had flung a scoopful of confetti in her undefended face!
It is generally Anglo-Saxons of the less refined class, English or Americans, who do these things at Carnival times.
The national love of a rough joke comes to the surface, encouraged by the license of the moment, and all the grace and prettiness of the festival vanish.
Katy laughed, and dusted herself as well as she could, and took refuge behind her mask; while a nimble American boy of the party changed places with her, and thenceforward made that particular Englishman his special target, plying such a lively and adroit shovel as to make Katy's assailant rue the hour when he evoked this national reprisal.