began to
feel the need of some hard contact. She drew her hands tight along the
harsh knotted cord that hung from her waist. She started to her feet
and seized the rough lid of the chest: there was nothing else to go in?
No. She closed the lid, pressing her hand upon the rough carving, and
looked it.

Then she remembered that she had still to complete her equipment as a
Pinzochera. The large leather purse or scarsella, with small coin in
it, had to be hung on the cord at her waist (her florins and small
jewels, presents from her godfather and cousin Brigida, were safely
fastened within her serge mantle)--and on the other side must hang the
rosary.

It did not occur to Romola, as she hung that rosary by her side, that
something else besides the mere garb would perhaps be necessary to
enable her to pass as a Pinzochera, and that her whole air and
expression were as little as possible like those of a sister whose
eyelids were used to be bent, and whose lips were used to move in silent
iteration. Her inexperience prevented her from picturing distant
details, and it helped her proud courage in shutting out any foreboding
of danger and insult. She did not know that any Florentine woman had
ever done exactly what she was going to do: unhappy wives often took
refuge with their friends, or in the cloister, she knew, but both those
courses were impossible to her; she had invented a lot for herself--to
go to the most learned woman in the world, Cassandra Fedele, at Venice,
and ask her how an instructed woman could support herself in a lonely
life there.

She was not daunted by the practical difficulties in the way or the dark
uncertainty at the end. Her life could never be happy any more, but it
must not, could not, be ignoble. And by a pathetic mixture of childish
romance with her woman's trials, the philosophy which had nothing to do
with this great decisive deed of hers had its place in her imagination
of the future: so far as she conceived her solitary loveless life at
all, she saw it animated by a proud stoical heroism, and by an
indistinct but strong purpose of labour, that she might be wise enough
to write something which would rescue her father's name from oblivion.
After all, she was only a young girl--this poor Romola, who had found
herself at the end of her joys.

There were other things yet to be done. There was a small key in a
casket on the table--but now Romola perceived that her taper was dying
out,