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showy jewellery: massive rings that danced about on her thin fingers, enormous bracelets laden with charms and pendants which looked as if they would at any moment slip off her bony wrists, brooches too elaborate for her scraggy bosom, earrings too big for her ugly, fleshless ears. I noticed too, once again, with a mingled feeling of familiarity and distaste, how the shoes on her feet and the bag that she held under her arm seemed to be too big. Then, finally, I pulled myself together and called to her.
    Characteristically mistrustful, she stopped immediately, as though somebody had placed a hand on her shoulder, and then turned without moving her legs, with the top part of her body only. I saw her long, pointed face with the hollow cheeks, the pinched mouth, the long, narrow nose, the glassy blue eyes which were looking at me obliquely. Then she smiled, turned right round and came to meet me, her head bowed, her eyes fixed on the ground, and saying as though it were a matter of duty: 'Good morning and many happy returns of the day'; and although her intention was affectionate, I could not help noticing that the sound of her voice remained as it always was, dry and croaking, like the caw of a rook. She said again, as she came up to me: 'Many happy returns of the day; and come on, give me a kiss!' And then I stooped down and hastily planted a kiss on her cheek. We walked off side by side towards the far end of the path. Pointing to the vines that covered the pergola, my mother suddenly said: 'D'you know what I was looking at? At my bunches of grapes here. Look!'
    I raised my eyes and saw that the bunches of grapes all looked as if they had been nibbled or sucked, some more and some less.
    'Lizards,' said my mother, in the curiously intimate, affectionate, and at the same time scientific tone of voice that she used when speaking of her flowers and plants; 'those nasty little creatures climb up the posts of the pergola and eat the grapes. They ruin my pergola; the black clusters amongst the green leaves and tendrils look so beautiful, but if the grapes are half nibbled away, the whole effect is spoilt,'
    I said something or other about a ceiling by Zuccari in a palace in Rome, in which the subject of the painting was, in fact, a golden pergola with clusters of black grapes and vine-leaves, and she went on: 'The other day a hen belonging to the peasants close by found its way, I don't know how, into the garden. One of these lizards was on the pergola, and was, of course, sucking at my grapes. Then, for some odd reason, it lost its footing and came tumbling down. Just imagine—it didn't even touch the ground: the hen caught it in its beak and positively drank it down. Yes, I really mean that—it drank it.'
    'Then you must take to keeping hens,' I said. 'They'll eat up the lizards, and the lizards, of necessity, having been eaten, will stop eating the grapes.'
    'For heaven's sake, no I Hens, besides eating lizards, destroy everything, wherever they go. I'd rather keep the lizards.'
    And so we went on round the garden, going down the long path underneath the pergola to the boundary wall and then walking through the greenhouses. My mother would stoop down and touch the corolla of a flower that had opened in the night, holding it between two fingers against the palm of her hand; or she would stand enraptured (there is no other word for it), glassy-eyed, in front of an earthenware flower-pot from which a fleshy plant, like a green, hairy snake, curled right down to the ground, so that you almost expected it to hiss at you; or again, in a dry, didactic manner, she would provide me with a quantity of botanical information, culled from her detailed reading of horticultural manuals as well as from her long conversations with her two gardeners, very patient because very well paid, upon whom she inflicted her company the whole time they were working in the garden. As I have already said, her love of flowers and plants was the only poetical