For she knew little as yet of how big the world is, and how long you may live in it, going to and fro, without necessarily knocking up against this one or that of its component units.
Next morning they rose betimes, and went out into the street to view the city. For to Linnet, as to Mrs Palmer, a city it was—and a very great one. Such streets and streets seemed to frighten and appal her. Florian had admired in that picturesque old capital of a mountain land, the antiquated tone, the eighteenth-century flavour, the mediæval survivals, the air as of a world elsewhere gone from us utterly. But to Linnet, though it was beautiful and impressive too, it was above all things magnificent, grandiose, stately, imposing. She gazed with open eyes at the Golden Roof, admired the bronze statues at the base of the Anna Column, looked up with silent awe at the front of the Landhaus, and thought the Rudolfsbrunnen, with its attendant griffins and dragons, a wonderful work of art for the world’s delectation.
Philippina went with her, her companion on the alp. Linnet noticed with much surprise—for she knew not as yet the difference in fibre between them—that Philippina, though as interested as herself in the shops and their contents, seemed wholly unimpressed by these other and vastly more attractive features of a civilised city. For Linnet had been gifted by nature, to the fullest degree, with the profound Tyrolese artistic susceptibility. Though her mind came to art as a blank page, it responded to the stimulus, once presented to its ken, as the sensitive plate of a photographic camera responds in every line to the inspiring picture.
As they strolled through the town, by Andreas Hausberger’s express desire—for the wise impresario had arranged their first appearance for that very evening, and wished the girls to come to it fresh, after a morning’s exercise—they paid comparatively little heed to what most of us regard as by far the most striking characteristic of Innsbruck—the great limestone crags that seem on every side to tower and overhang the very roofs of the city. They were accustomed, indeed, to crags, and made very small case of them. It was the houses, the shops, the noise, the crowd, the gaiety, that chiefly struck them. Innsbruck to Linnet was as a little Paris. But as they went on their way through the bustling streets, they came at last to a church door, which Linnet’s profound religious nature could hardly pass by without one minute’s prayer for Our Lady’s aid at this critical turning-point of her artistic history.