h his will is destined to
snap like a dry twig."

"My dear boy," said Rowland, "don't talk about the will being
'destined.' The will is destiny itself. That 's the way to look at it."

"Look at it, my dear Rowland," Roderick answered, "as you find
most comfortable. One conviction I have gathered from my summer's
experience," he went on--"it 's as well to look it frankly in the
face--is that I possess an almost unlimited susceptibility to the
influence of a beautiful woman."

Rowland stared, then strolled away, softly whistling to himself. He
was unwilling to admit even to himself that this speech had really the
sinister meaning it seemed to have. In a few days the two young men made
their way back to Italy, and lingered a while in Florence before
going on to Rome. In Florence Roderick seemed to have won back his old
innocence and his preference for the pleasures of study over any others.
Rowland began to think of the Baden episode as a bad dream, or at
the worst as a mere sporadic piece of disorder, without roots in his
companion's character. They passed a fortnight looking at pictures
and exploring for out the way bits of fresco and carving, and Roderick
recovered all his earlier fervor of appreciation and comment. In Rome he
went eagerly to work again, and finished in a month two or three small
things he had left standing on his departure. He talked the most joyous
nonsense about finding himself back in his old quarters. On the first
Sunday afternoon following their return, on their going together to
Saint Peter's, he delivered himself of a lyrical greeting to the great
church and to the city in general, in a tone of voice so irrepressibly
elevated that it rang through the nave in rather a scandalous fashion,
and almost arrested a procession of canons who were marching across to
the choir. He began to model a new statue--a female figure, of which he
had said nothing to Rowland. It represented a woman, leaning lazily back
in her chair, with her head drooping as if she were listening, a vague
smile on her lips, and a pair of remarkably beautiful arms folded in her
lap. With rather less softness of contour, it would have resembled the
noble statue of Agrippina in the Capitol. Rowland looked at it and was
not sure he liked it. "Who is it? what does it mean?" he asked.

"Anything you please!" said Roderick, with a certain petulance. "I call
it A Reminiscence."

Rowland then remembered that one of the Baden ladies had