The Seas of God; A Novel (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER I MASSES of ice floated by in the turbid Arno on which the windows of the Pension Paggi looked down. For Italy, it was a winter of extreme severity, and the confort moderne, which the Pension Paggi advertised, being of course a quite relative expression, was not interpreted by beautiful Signora Paggi, nor furnished her patrons, in terms of heat. There were the same inadequate provisions for heating this otherwise delightful--and its delights were many--Pension Paggi, that Lydia had known so well in her childhood and girlhood in Kingsville. After all, there must be much that isJ alike in all Southern climes. She found a sort of tantalising pleasure, here as elsewhere, in fancying even the least resemblance to that old Southern town in her own country which she would never see again. Indeed, days with fiercely hot sun that kept breaking in on the snow and storms of this Florentine winter were very like those springlike, sweet-promising, fickle days she remembered of a Kingsville winter. She had dreamed all her life--as who that dreams at all has not dreamed?--of Italy. And now she was in Italy. There had been the first few, almost inevitable, shocks. She could not reconcile herself at once to the Southern churches, to their motley outer garb, their convict's stripes of black and white; to an inner aspect of them she found bare and forbidding, or on the other hand, and more often, too frivolously gorgeous. She felt she must always love better the great grey churches her eyes had beheld first, the great churches of England and of France, athwart whose mysterious inner gloom she remembered rich dark rays piercing slantingly through jewelled windows. She felt she must always care more for Northern churches and like better Northern galleries--she was fati...