This time, however, he presented himself bravely enough; for in the way of activity it was something definite, at least, to be going to Europe and to be meaning to spend the winter in Rome.  Cecilia met him in the early dusk at the gate of her little garden, amid a studied combination of floral perfumes.  A rosy widow of twenty-eight, half cousin, half hostess, doing the honors of an odorous cottage on a midsummer evening, was a phenomenon to which the young man’s imagination was able to do ample justice.  Cecilia was always gracious, but this evening she was almost joyous.  She was in a happy mood, and Mallet imagined there was a private reason for it—­a reason quite distinct from her pleasure in receiving her honored kinsman.  The next day he flattered himself he was on the way to discover it.

For the present, after tea, as they sat on the rose-framed porch, while Rowland held his younger cousin between his knees, and she, enjoying her situation, listened timorously for the stroke of bedtime, Cecilia insisted on talking more about her visitor than about herself.

“What is it you mean to do in Europe?” she asked, lightly, giving a turn to the frill of her sleeve—­just such a turn as seemed to Mallet to bring out all the latent difficulties of the question.

“Why, very much what I do here,” he answered.  “No great harm.”

“Is it true,” Cecilia asked, “that here you do no great harm?  Is not a man like you doing harm when he is not doing positive good?”

“Your compliment is ambiguous,” said Rowland.

“No,” answered the widow, “you know what I think of you.  You have a particular aptitude for beneficence.  You have it in the first place in your character.  You are a benevolent person.  Ask Bessie if you don’t hold her more gently and comfortably than any of her other admirers.”

“He holds me more comfortably than Mr. Hudson,” Bessie declared, roundly.

Rowland, not knowing Mr. Hudson, could but half appreciate the eulogy, and Cecilia went on to develop her idea.  “Your circumstances, in the second place, suggest the idea of social usefulness.  You are intelligent, you are well-informed, and your charity, if one may call it charity, would be discriminating.  You are rich and unoccupied, so that it might be abundant.  Therefore, I say, you are a person to do something on a large scale.  Bestir yourself, dear Rowland, or we may be taught to think that virtue herself is setting a bad example.”

“Heaven forbid,” cried Rowland, “that I should set the examples of virtue!  I am quite willing to follow them, however, and if I don’t do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have not recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.  Pray, what shall I do?  Found an orphan asylum, or build a dormitory for Harvard College?  I am not rich enough to do either in an ideally handsome way, and I confess that, yet awhile, I feel too young to strike my grand coup.  I am holding myself ready for inspiration.  I am waiting till something takes my fancy irresistibly.  If inspiration comes at forty, it will be a hundred pities to have tied up my money-bag at thirty.”