y my stars;
but if we don't, I shall have done something I never expected to--I
shall have had a glimpse of ideal beauty." He sat down again and went
on with his sketch of the Juno, scrawled away for ten minutes, and then
handed the result in silence to Rowland. Rowland uttered an exclamation
of surprise and applause. The drawing represented the Juno as to the
position of the head, the brow, and the broad fillet across the hair;
but the eyes, the mouth, the physiognomy were a vivid portrait of
the young girl with the poodle. "I have been wanting a subject," said
Roderick: "there 's one made to my hand! And now for work!"

They saw no more of the young girl, though Roderick looked hopefully,
for some days, into the carriages on the Pincian. She had evidently been
but passing through Rome; Naples or Florence now happily possessed her,
and she was guiding her fleecy companion through the Villa Reale or the
Boboli Gardens with the same superb defiance of irony. Roderick went to
work and spent a month shut up in his studio; he had an idea, and he was
not to rest till he had embodied it. He had established himself in
the basement of a huge, dusky, dilapidated old house, in that long,
tortuous, and preeminently Roman street which leads from the Corso to
the Bridge of St. Angelo. The black archway which admitted you might
have served as the portal of the Augean stables, but you emerged
presently upon a mouldy little court, of which the fourth side was
formed by a narrow terrace, overhanging the Tiber. Here, along the
parapet, were stationed half a dozen shapeless fragments of sculpture,
with a couple of meagre orange-trees in terra-cotta tubs, and an
oleander that never flowered. The unclean, historic river swept beneath;
behind were dusky, reeking walls, spotted here and there with hanging
rags and flower-pots in windows; opposite, at a distance, were the bare
brown banks of the stream, the huge rotunda of St. Angelo, tipped with
its seraphic statue, the dome of St. Peter's, and the broad-topped pines
of the Villa Doria. The place was crumbling and shabby and melancholy,
but the river was delightful, the rent was a trifle, and everything was
picturesque. Roderick was in the best humor with his quarters from the
first, and was certain that the working mood there would be intenser
in an hour than in twenty years of Northampton. His studio was a huge,
empty room with a vaulted ceiling, covered with vague, dark traces of an
old fr