r u i n s (i found it)

Isabel took a drive alone that afternoon; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend  from her carriage and tread upon the daisies.  She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe.  She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness.

- - Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady