Part One
Chapter 2: In Santa Croce with No Baedeker
(continued)
"Were you snubbed?" asked his son tranquilly.
"But we have spoilt the pleasure of I don't know how many people.
They won't come back."
"...full of innate sympathy...quickness to perceive good in
others...vision of the brotherhood of man..." Scraps of the
lecture on St. Francis came floating round the partition wall.
"Don't let us spoil yours," he continued to Lucy. "Have you
looked at those saints?"
"Yes," said Lucy. "They are lovely. Do you know which is the
tombstone that is praised in Ruskin?"
He did not know, and suggested that they should try to guess it.
George, rather to her relief, refused to move, and she and the
old man wandered not unpleasantly about Santa Croce, which,
though it is like a barn, has harvested many beautiful things
inside its walls. There were also beggars to avoid. and guides to
dodge round the pillars, and an old lady with her dog, and here
and there a priest modestly edging to his Mass through the groups
of tourists. But Mr. Emerson was only half interested. He watched
the lecturer, whose success he believed he had impaired, and then
he anxiously watched his son.
"Why will he look at that fresco?" he said uneasily. "I saw
nothing in it."
"I like Giotto," she replied. "It is so wonderful what they say
about his tactile values. Though I like things like the Della
Robbia babies better."
"So you ought. A baby is worth a dozen saints. And my baby's
worth the whole of Paradise, and as far as I can see he lives in
Hell."
Lucy again felt that this did not do.
"In Hell," he repeated. "He's unhappy."
"Oh, dear!" said Lucy.
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