Isabel took me directly to the suite which was decorated by Pinturicchio for Alexander VI.  We looked at the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Magi, and the Resurrection.  Somehow I was more moved by these paintings than by anything I had yet seen in Rome.  The soul of this painter took possession of me.  Then recalling what Isabel had said I asked her:  “Where is the face, Isabel, you wished to show me?” “There,” she said.  “Turn around.”  I did and saw a bronze bust on a pedestal.  “That, you mean?” Isabel nodded.  I walked closer to it.  It was Pinturicchio.

A deeper emotion than I had ever before felt before a work of art took possession of me.  Such wisdom, benignity, genius!  What a soul belonged to this man!  I looked about to see if we were watched by guards.  As we were alone I put up my hands to caress this face, moved by some unknown impulse.  Touching the silken surface of the bronze my whole imaginative power seemed to awake; my life spread out before me.  I know not what it was; memories of so many things; not least of all Isabel’s presence understanding what I felt.  My eyes blinded; my shoulders shook a little.  Isabel came to me and gently put her hand on my arm.  We walked away.  “Who was Pinturicchio?” I asked of Isabel.  And she told me.  I took a guide-book out of my pocket and began to read.  “There is a story,” it said, “that Pinturicchio was starved by his wife during his last illness.”  I closed the book.  After all had not Douglas been starved in the finer part of his genius by the life to which he was wedded?  How would his face look in bronze, ridged with reason and controversy; what could ever bring him out of the dust and noise of the levels where he was battling, even to the plateaus to which poor Serafino had climbed?

After that I looked at everything of Pinturicchio’s I could find in Rome.  We found his Coronation of the Virgin, his frescoes of St. Antonio.  But Isabel, who had already been to the Villa d’Este with Uncle Tom, began now day by day to plan another excursion there.  She had not gone up to Tivoli, nor seen the cataracts; we could do all of this in an afternoon if we did not stop to wander through Hadrian’s Villa.  This time Serafino went with us; but Uncle Tom was again indisposed, and laughingly bade us to go on and leave him to an afternoon at Canape’s with his cronies.

Serafino rode on the box with the driver, and that left Isabel and me to something like a privacy, as we drove by the quarries of travertine where the slaves of old Rome went blind and died hewing out the stone that went to the building of the Coliseum and the theaters of Marcellus and Pompey.  We passed the little stream whose waters were blue with sulphur, filling the air with its odor.  The grasses and herbs were green; here and there an almond tree was in blossom.  The dark cypresses of Hadrian’s Villa stood like spires of thunder clouds against the wonderful azures of this uplifting sky.  Before us were the mountains, pine-clad, vineyard-clad; and far up the gleam of a cascade shone like a bent sword in the sun.