had yet seen in Rome. The soul of this painter took
possession of me. Then recalling what Isabel had said I asked her:
"Where is the face, Isabel, you wished to show me?" "There," she said.
"Turn around." I did and saw a bronze bust on a pedestal. "That, you
mean?" Isabel nodded. I walked closer to it. It was Pinturicchio.

A deeper emotion than I had ever before felt before a work of art took
possession of me. Such wisdom, benignity, genius! What a soul belonged
to this man! I looked about to see if we were watched by guards. As we
were alone I put up my hands to caress this face, moved by some unknown
impulse. Touching the silken surface of the bronze my whole imaginative
power seemed to awake; my life spread out before me. I know not what it
was; memories of so many things; not least of all Isabel's presence
understanding what I felt. My eyes blinded; my shoulders shook a little.
Isabel came to me and gently put her hand on my arm. We walked away.
"Who was Pinturicchio?" I asked of Isabel. And she told me. I took a
guide-book out of my pocket and began to read. "There is a story," it
said, "that Pinturicchio was starved by his wife during his last
illness." I closed the book. After all had not Douglas been starved in
the finer part of his genius by the life to which he was wedded? How
would his face look in bronze, ridged with reason and controversy; what
could ever bring him out of the dust and noise of the levels where he
was battling, even to the plateaus to which poor Serafino had climbed?

After that I looked at everything of Pinturicchio's I could find in
Rome. We found his Coronation of the Virgin, his frescoes of St.
Antonio. But Isabel, who had already been to the Villa d'Este with Uncle
Tom, began now day by day to plan another excursion there. She had not
gone up to Tivoli, nor seen the cataracts; we could do all of this in an
afternoon if we did not stop to wander through Hadrian's Villa. This
time Serafino went with us; but Uncle Tom was again indisposed, and
laughingly bade us to go on and leave him to an afternoon at Canape's
with his cronies.

Serafino rode on the box with the driver, and that left Isabel and me to
something like a privacy, as we drove by the quarries of travertine
where the slaves of old Rome went blind and died hewing out the stone
that went to the building of the Coliseum and the theaters of Marcellus
and Pompey. We passed the little stream whose waters were blue with
sulphur, f