I had
not quite the courage to ring and ask if we were at home; but, standing
across the way and looking up at the window, it seemed to me that I
might have seen my own young face peering out in a somewhat suspicious
question of the old eyes staring up so fixedly at it. Who was I, and
what was I doing there? Was I waiting, hanging idly about, to see the
Armenian archbishop coming to carry my other self in his red coach to
the Sistine Chapel, where we were to hear Pius IX. say mass? There was
no harm in my hanging about, but the street was narrow and there was a
chance of my being ground up by some passing cart against the wall there
behind me if I was not careful. I could not tell my proud young double
that we were one, and that I was going in the archbishop's red coach as
well; he would never have believed it of my gray hairs and sunken
figure. I could not even ask him what had become of the grocer near by,
whom I used to get some homely supplies of, perhaps eggs or oranges, or
the like, when I came out in the December mornings, and who, when I said
that it was very cold, would own that it was _un poco rigidetto,_ or a
little bit stiffish.
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