from which he could look up between the brick pillars of the
_loggia_ at the naked stars. If he had been younger he would, in his
sleepless hours, have owned to himself that he was suffering from "what
men call love," but he could not believe easily that Edmund Grosse at
forty was as silly as any boy of twenty. He pished and pshawed at the
absurdity. He could not accept anything so simple and goody as his own
story. That ever since Rose married he had put her out of his thought
from very love and reverence for her seemed an absurd thing to say of a
man of his record. Yet it was true; and all the more in consequence did
the thought of Rose as a free woman derange his whole inner life now,
while the thought of Rose insulted by the dead hand of the man she had
married was gall and wormwood. What must Rose think of men? She had been
so anxious to find a great and good man; and she had found David Bright,
whose mistress was now enjoying his great wealth somewhere below in the
old Tuscan capital. And how could Edmund venture to be the next man
offered to her?--Edmund who had done nothing all these years, who had
sunk with the opportunity of wealth; whose talents had been lost or
misused. He seemed to see Rose kneeling at her prayers--the golden head
bowed, the girlish figure bent. He could think of nothing in himself to
distract her back to earth, poor beautiful child! Yet he had not nursed
or petted or even welcomed the old passion of his boyhood. He wanted to
be without it and its discomforting reproaches. It was too late to
change anything or anybody. At forty how could he have a career, and
what good would come of it? Yet his love for Rose was insistent on the
necessity of making Rose's lover into a different man from the present
Edmund Grosse. It was absurd and medieval to suppose that if he did some
great or even moderately great work he could win her by doing it. It
might be absurd, yet contrariwise he felt convinced that she would never
take him as he was now.

So he wearied as he turned on the couch that became less and less
comfortable, till he rose and, with a rug thrown over him, leant on the
brick balustrade of the _loggia_. He stood looking at the stars in the
dimness, not wholly unlike the figure of some old Roman noble in his
toga, nor perhaps wholly unlike the figure of the unconverted Augustine,
weary of himself and of all things.

But this remark only shows how the stars and the deep blue openings into
the