Music was playing there,
and in front of the balconies were many chairs and little tables where
people drank tea and fed the strutting pigeons. Beyond the bubbly domes
shimmered a panorama of beauty which by force of its magnificence
redeemed the frivolous fairyland from vulgarity, rather than rebuked it.
Under the rain of rose and gold, as if seen through opaline gauze, shone
sea and hills and distant mountains. On a green height a ruined castle
and its vassal rock-village seemed to have fallen from the top and been
arrested by some miracle halfway down. Beneath, a peninsula of pines
silvered with olives floated on a sea of burnished gold; and above
soared mountains that went billowing away to the east and to Italy, deep
purple-red in the wine of sunset.
Mary forgot that people do not come to hotels for the sole purpose of
standing on the steps to admire a view. It was a liveried servant who
politely reminded her of her duty by holding the glass door open and
murmuring a suggestion that Mademoiselle should give herself the pain of
entering. Then, slightly dazed by new impressions and the magnitude of
her independence, Mary walked humbly into an immense hall, marble paved
and marble columned. She had never seen anything half so gorgeous, and
though she did not know yet whether she liked or disliked the
bewildering decorations of mermaids and sea animals and flowers, she was
struck by their magnificent audacity into a sense of her own
insignificance.
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