ctures?"
asked Margery one morning, when they had found their favorite place.

"I think it would be just like her vanity to point out her own likeness
to people who were copying or looking at the frescoes, according to the
old story," answered Bettina, with a disapproving shake of the head.

"Well," said Barbara, "the faces and figures and draperies are all
lovely. But I suppose it is true, as Mr. Sumner says, that Andrea del
Sarto did not try to make the faces show any holy feeling, or indeed any
very noble expression, so that they are not so great pictures as they
would have been had he been high-minded enough to do such things."

"It is a shame to have a man's life and work harmed by a woman, even
though she was his wife," said Malcom, emphatically.

"All the more that she was his wife," said Barbara. "But I do not
believe he could have done much better without Lucrezia. I think his
very love for such a woman shows a weakness in his character. It would
have been better if he had chosen other than sacred subjects, would it
not, Howard?"

They were quite at home in their study of these more modern pictures,
with photographs of which they were already somewhat familiar. Howard,
especially, had always had a fine and critical taste regarding art
matters, and now, among the works of artists of whom he knew something,
was a valuable member of the little coterie, and often appealed to when
Mr. Sumner was absent.

And thus they had talked over and over again the impressions which each
artist and his work made on them, until even Mr. Sumner was astonished
and delighted at the evident result of the interest he had awakened.

But the chief man and artist they were now considering, was Michael
Angelo; and the more they learned of him the more true it was, they
thought, that he "filled all Florence." They eagerly followed every step
of his life from the time when, a young lad, he entered Ghirlandajo's
studio, until he was brought to Florence--a dead old man, concealed in a
bale of merchandise, because the authorities refused permission to his
friends to take his body from Rome--and was buried at midnight in Santa
Croce.

They tried to imagine his life during the four years which he spent in
the Medici Palace, now Palazzo Riccardi, under the patronage of Lorenzo
the Magnificent, while he was studying with the same tremendous energy
that marked all his life, going almost daily to the Brancacci Chapel to
learn from Masaccio'