For that reason he was deeply bored by his colorless, humdrum existence, so far removed from that other purely imaginative life which rose from the pages of his books and enveloped him with an exotic, exciting perfume.

Some day he would be free, and take flight on his own wings; and that day of liberation would come when he got to be deputy.  He waited for his coming of age much as an heir-apparent waits for the moment of his coronation.

From early boyhood he had been taught to look forward to the great event which would cut his life in two, opening out new pathways for a “forward march” to fame and fortune.

“When my little boy gets to be deputy,” his mother would say in her rare moments of affectionate expansiveness, “the girls will fight for him because he is so handsome!  And he’ll marry a millionairess!”

Meanwhile, in long years of impatient anticipation, his life went on, with no special circumstance to break its dull monotony—­the life of an aspirant certain of his lot, “killing time” till the call should come to enter on his heritage.  He was like those noble youngsters of bygone centuries who, graced in their cradles by the rank of colonel from the monarch, played around with hoop and top till they were old enough to join their regiments.  He had been born a deputy, and a deputy he was sure to be:  for the moment, he was waiting for his cue in the wings of the theatre of life.

His trip to Italy on a pilgrimage to see the Pope was the one event that had disturbed the dreary course of his existence.  But in that country of marvels, with a pious canon for a guide, he visited churches rather than museums.  Of theatres he saw only two—­larks permitted by his tutor, whose austerity was somewhat mollified in those changing scenes.  Indifferently they passed the famous artistic works of the Italian churches, but paused always to venerate some relic with miracles as famous as absurd.  Even so, Rafael managed to catch a confused and passing glimpse of a world different from the one in which he was predestined to pass his life.  From a distance he sensed something of the love of pleasure and romance he had drunk in like an intoxicating wine from his reading.  In Milan he admired a gilded, adventurous bohemia of opera; in Rome, the splendor of a refined, artistic aristocracy in perpetual rivalry with that of Paris and London; and in Florence, an English nobility that had come in quest of sunlight and a chance to air its straw hats, show off the fair hair of its ladies, and chatter its own language in gardens where once upon a time the somber Dante dreamed and Boccaccio told his merry tales to drive fear of plague away.