There had been splendid things in it, then--she would not ask what had become of them, but without asking, she was told that they had been wisely disposed of, and that instead of paying people for keeping an uninhabited palace in order, she was receiving an enormous rent for it from the city.
Then she had wished to see the lovely villa that came back in the pictures of her dreams, and she had been driven out into the country according to her desire.

From a distance, as the carriage approached it, she recognized the lordly poplars, and far at the end of the avenue the elaborately stuccoed front and cornices of the old-fashioned "barocco" building.

But the gardens were gone.

Files of neatly trimmed vines, trained upon poles stuck in deep furrows, stretched away from the avenue on either side.

The flower garden was a vegetable garden now, and the artichokes and the cabbages and the broccoli were planted with mathematical regularity up to the very walls.