ce, no matter how empty-headed, is the result of an
hereditary cultivation of what is thought beautiful, and that the
vainest, silliest woman who dresses well by instinct is an artist in her
way.

In Francesca Campodonico there was much more than such superficial
taste, and in her Reanda found the only true companion he had ever
known. He might have been for twenty years the intimate friend of all
Roman society without meeting such another, and he knew it, and
appreciated his good fortune. For he was not naturally a dissatisfied
man, nor at all given to complain of his lot. Few men are, who have
active, creative genius, and whose profession gives them all the scope
they need. Of late years, too, Francesca had treated him with a sort of
deference which he got from no one else in the world. He realized that
she did, without attempting to account for the fact, which, indeed,
depended on something past his comprehension.

He felt for her something like veneration. The word does not express
exactly the attitude of his mind towards her, but no other defines his
position so well. He was not in love with her in the Italian sense of
the expression, for he did not conceive it possible that she should ever
love him, whereas he told himself that he might possibly marry, if he
found a wife to his taste, and be in love with his wife without in the
least infringing upon his devotion to Donna Francesca.

That she was young and lovely, if not beautiful, he saw and knew. He
even admitted unconsciously that if she had been an old woman he could
not have 'venerated' her as he did, though veneration, as such, is the
due of the old rather than of the young. Her spiritual eyes and virginal
face were often before him in his dreams and waking thoughts. There was
a maidenlike modesty, as it were, even about her graceful bodily self,
which belonged, in his imagination, to a saint upon an altar, rather
than to a statue upon a pedestal. There was something in the sweep of
her soft dark brown hair which suggested that it would be sacrilege and
violence for a man's hand to touch it. There was a dewy delicacy on her
young lips, as though they could kiss nothing more earthly than a newly
opened flower, already above the earth, but not yet touched by the sun.
There was a thoughtful turn of modelling in the smooth, white forehead,
which it was utterly beyond Reanda's art to reproduce, often as he had
tried. He thought a great sculptor might succeed, an