Vesuvius, which was silver veiled the day before, was now of a soft,
smoky white, and the sea, of a milky blue, swam round the shore and out
to every dim island and low cape and cliffy promontory. The street was
full of people on foot and in trolleys and cabs and donkey
pleasure-carts, and the familiar teasing of cabmen and peddlers and
beggars began with my first steps toward what I remembered as the
Toledo, but what now called itself, with the moderner Italian
patriotism, the Via Roma. The sole poetic novelty of my experience was
in my being offered loaves of bread which, when I bought them, would be
given to the poor, in honor of what saint's day I did not learn. But it
was all charming; even the inattention of the young woman over the
book-counter was charming, since it was a condition of her flirtation
with the far younger man beside me who wanted something far more
interesting from her than any brief sketch of the history of Naples, in
either English or Italian or French or, at the worst, German.
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