o Florence, rambled through her close, dim streets, and
lounged away mornings in the churches and galleries. On many of these
occasions Rowland bore him company, for they were the times when he
was most like his former self. Before Michael Angelo's statues and the
pictures of the early Tuscans, he quite forgot his own infelicities, and
picked up the thread of his old aesthetic loquacity. He had a particular
fondness for Andrea del Sarto, and affirmed that if he had been a
painter he would have taken the author of the Madonna del Sacco for his
model. He found in Florence some of his Roman friends, and went down on
certain evenings to meet them. More than once he asked Mary Garland to
go with him into town, and showed her the things he most cared for. He
had some modeling clay brought up to the villa and deposited in a room
suitable for his work; but when this had been done he turned the key in
the door and the clay never was touched. His eye was heavy and his hand
cold, and his mother put up a secret prayer that he might be induced
to see a doctor. But on a certain occasion, when her prayer became
articulate, he had a great outburst of anger and begged her to know,
once for all, that his health was better than it had ever been. On
the whole, and most of the time, he was a sad spectacle; he looked so
hopelessly idle. If he was not querulous and bitter, it was because he
had taken an extraordinary vow not to be; a vow heroic, for him, a vow
which those who knew him well had the tenderness to appreciate. Talking
with him was like skating on thin ice, and his companions had a constant
mental vision of spots designated "dangerous."

This was a difficult time for Rowland; he said to himself that he would
endure it to the end, but that it must be his last adventure of the
kind. Mrs. Hudson divided her time between looking askance at her son,
with her hands tightly clasped about her pocket-handkerchief, as if she
were wringing it dry of the last hour's tears, and turning her eyes
much more directly upon Rowland, in the mutest, the feeblest, the most
intolerable reproachfulness. She never phrased her accusations, but he
felt that in the unillumined void of the poor lady's mind they loomed
up like vaguely-outlined monsters. Her demeanor caused him the acutest
suffering, and if, at the outset of his enterprise, he had seen, how
dimly soever, one of those plaintive eye-beams in the opposite scale,
the brilliancy of Roderick's promise