which love and delight were gone. She unfastened the thick white cord
and spread the bundle out on the table. It was the grey serge dress of
a sister belonging to the third order of Saint Francis, living in the
world but especially devoted to deeds of piety--a personage whom the
Florentines were accustomed to call a Pinzochera. Romola was going to
put on this dress as a disguise, and she determined to put it on at
once, so that, if she needed sleep before the morning, she might wake up
in perfect readiness to be gone. She put off her black garment, and as
she thrust her soft white arms into the harsh sleeves of the serge
mantle and felt the hard girdle of rope hurt her fingers as she tied it,
she courted those rude sensations: they were in keeping with her new
scorn of that thing called pleasure which made men base--that dexterous
contrivance for selfish ease, that shrinking from endurance and strain,
when others were bowing beneath burdens too heavy for them, which now
made one image with her husband. Then she gathered her long hair
together, drew it away tight from her face, bound it in a great hard
knot at the back of her head, and taking a square piece of black silk,
tied it in the fashion of a kerchief close across her head and under her
chin; and over that she drew the cowl. She lifted the candle to the
mirror. Surely her disguise would be complete to any one who had not
lived very near to her. To herself she looked strangely like her
brother Dino: the full oval of the cheek had only to be wasted; the
eyes, already sad, had only to become a little sunken. Was she getting
more like him in anything else? Only in this, that she understood now
how men could be prompted to rush away for ever from earthly delights,
how they could be prompted to dwell on images of sorrow rather than of
beauty and joy.

But she did not linger at the mirror: she set about collecting and
packing all the relics of her father and mother that were too large to
be carried in her small travelling-wallet. They were all to be put in
the chest along with her wedding-clothes, and the chest was to be
committed to her godfather when she was safely gone. First she laid in
the portraits; then one by one every little thing that had a sacred
memory clinging to it was put into her wallet or into the chest.

She paused. There was still something else to be stript away from her,
belonging to that past on which she was going to turn her back for