e air (since, as was believed,
he continued to write) of keeping it up in order to have something
more--as if he hadn't at the worst enough--to be silent about.
Whatever his air, at any rate, Peter's occasional unmentioned prose
and verse were quite truly the result of an impulse to maintain
the purity of his taste by establishing still more firmly the right
relation of fame to feebleness. The little green door of his domain
was in a garden-wall on which the discoloured stucco made patches,
and in the small detached villa behind it everything was old, the
furniture, the servants, the books, the prints, the immemorial habits
and the new improvements. The Mallows, at Carrara Lodge, were within
ten minutes, and the studio there was on their little land, to which
they had added, in their happy faith, for building it. This was the
good fortune, if it was not the ill, of her having brought him in
marriage a portion that put them in a manner at their ease and enabled
them thus, on their side, to keep it up. And they did keep it up--they
always had--the infatuated sculptor and his wife, for whom nature
had refined on the impossible by relieving them of the sense of the
difficult. Morgan had at all events everything of the sculptor but
the spirit of Phidias--the brown velvet, the becoming _beretto_, the
'plastic' presence, the fine fingers, the beautiful accent in Italian
and the old Italian factotum. He seemed to make up for everything when
he addressed Egidio with the 'tu' and waved him to turn one of the
rotary pedestals of which the place was full. They were tremendous
Italians at Carrara Lodge, and the secret of the part played by this
fact in Peter's life was in a large degree that it gave him, sturdy
Briton as he was, just the amount of 'going abroad' he could bear. The
Mallows were all his Italy, but it was in a measure for Italy he liked
them. His one worry was that Lance--to which they had shortened his
godson--was, in spite of a public school, perhaps a shade too Italian.
Morgan meanwhile looked like somebody's flattering idea of somebody's
own person as expressed in the great room provided at the Uffizi
Museum for the general illustration of that idea by eminent hands. The
Master's sole regret that he hadn't been born rather to the brush than
to the chisel sprang from his wish that he might have contributed to
that collection.

It appeared with time at any rate to be to the brush that Lance had
been born; for Mrs Ma