most reserves. He couldn't tell Mrs Mallow--or at least he supposed,
excellent man, he couldn't--that she was the one beautiful reason he
had never married; any more than he could tell her husband that the
sight of the multiplied marbles in that gentleman's studio was an
affliction of which even time had never blunted the edge. His victory,
however, as I have intimated, in regard to these productions, was not
simply in his not having let it out that he deplored them; it was,
remarkably, in his not having kept it in by anything else.

The whole situation, among these good people, was verily a marvel, and
there was probably not such another for a long way from the spot that
engages us--the point at which the soft declivity of Hampstead began
at that time to confess in broken accents to Saint John's Wood.
He despised Mallow's statues and adored Mallow's wife, and yet was
distinctly fond of Mallow, to whom, in turn, he was equally dear. Mrs
Mallow rejoiced in the statues--though she preferred, when pressed,
the busts; and if she was visibly attached to Peter Brench it was
because of his affection for Morgan. Each loved the other moreover for
the love borne in each case to Lancelot, whom the Mallows respectively
cherished as their only child and whom the friend of their fireside
identified as the third--but decidedly the handsomest--of his godsons.
Already in the old years it had come to that--that no one, for such
a relation, could possibly have occurred to any of them, even to the
baby itself, but Peter. There was luckily a certain independence, of
the pecuniary sort, all round: the Master could never otherwise have
spent his solemn _Wanderjahre_ in Florence and Rome, and continued
by the Thames as well as by the Arno and the Tiber to add unpurchased
group to group and model, for what was too apt to prove in the
event mere love, fancy-heads of celebrities either too busy or too
buried--too much of the age or too little of it--to sit. Neither could
Peter, lounging in almost daily, have found time to keep the whole
complicated tradition so alive by his presence. He was massive but
mild, the depositary of these mysteries--large and loose and ruddy and
curly, with deep tones, deep eyes, deep pockets, to say nothing of
the habit of long pipes, soft hats and brownish greyish weather-faded
clothes, apparently always the same.

He had 'written', it was known, but had never spoken, never spoken
in particular of that; and he had th