There could have been
nothing better than those days with him--the Louvre, the Uffizi, the
Pitti Palace. Perry's search for beauty was almost breathless. We swept
from Filippo Lippi to Botticelli and Bellini, then on to Ghirlandajo,
Guido Reni, Correggio, Del Sarto--the incomparable Leonardo.

"If I had lived then," Perry would say, glowing, "in Florence or in
Venice!"

And I, smiling at his enthusiasm, had a vision of him among those golden
painters, his own young beauty enhanced by robes of clear color, his
thirst for loveliness appeased by the sumptuous settings of that age of
romance.

Then when the great moderns confronted us--Sorolla and the rest--Perry
complained, "Why did I study law, Roger, when I might be doing things
like this?"

"It is not too late," I told him.

I felt that he must not be curbed, that his impassioned interest might
blossom and bloom into genius if it were given a proper outlet.

So it came about that he decided to paint. He would stay in Paris a year
or two in a studio, and test his talent.

But his people would not hear of it. There had been lawyers in his
family for generations. Since the Civil War they had followed more or
less successful careers. Perry's own father had made no money, but
Perry's mother was obsessed by the idea that the fortunes of the family
were bound up in her son's continuance of his father's practice.

So Perry went home and opened an office. His heart was not in it, but he
made enough to live on, and at last he made money enough to marry a
wife. He would have married her whether he had enough to live on or not.
She was an artist, and she was twenty when Perry met her. We had been
spending a month in Maine, on an island as charming as it was cheap.
Rosalie was there with a great-aunt and uncle. She was painting the sea
on the day that Perry first saw her, and she wore a jade-green smock.
Her hair was red, drawn back rather tightly from her forehead, but
breaking into waves over her ears. With the red of her cheeks and the
red of her lips she had something of the look of Lorenzo Lotto's lovely
ladies, except for a certain sharp slenderness, a slenderness which
came, I was to learn later, from an utter indifference to the claims of
appetite. She was one of those who sell bread to buy hyacinths.

I speak of this here because Rosalie's almost ascetic indifference to
material matters, in direct contrast to Perry's vivid enjoyment of the
good things of life, ca