“You had better go and ask her,” said Rowland, laughing.  “She is certainly most beautiful.”

“Beautiful?  She ’s beauty itself—­she ’s a revelation.  I don’t believe she is living—­she ’s a phantasm, a vapor, an illusion!”

“The poodle,” said Rowland, “is certainly alive.”

“Nay, he too may be a grotesque phantom, like the black dog in Faust.”

“I hope at least that the young lady has nothing in common with Mephistopheles.  She looked dangerous.”

“If beauty is immoral, as people think at Northampton,” said Roderick, “she is the incarnation of evil.  The mamma and the queer old gentleman, moreover, are a pledge of her reality.  Who are they all?”

“The Prince and Princess Ludovisi and the principessina,” suggested Rowland.

“There are no such people,” said Roderick.  “Besides, the little old man is not the papa.”  Rowland smiled, wondering how he had ascertained these facts, and the young sculptor went on.  “The old man is a Roman, a hanger-on of the mamma, a useful personage who now and then gets asked to dinner.  The ladies are foreigners, from some Northern country; I won’t say which.”

“Perhaps from the State of Maine,” said Rowland.

“No, she ’s not an American, I ’ll lay a wager on that.  She ’s a daughter of this elder world.  We shall see her again, I pray my stars; but if we don’t, I shall have done something I never expected to—­I shall have had a glimpse of ideal beauty.”  He sat down again and went on with his sketch of the Juno, scrawled away for ten minutes, and then handed the result in silence to Rowland.  Rowland uttered an exclamation of surprise and applause.  The drawing represented the Juno as to the position of the head, the brow, and the broad fillet across the hair; but the eyes, the mouth, the physiognomy were a vivid portrait of the young girl with the poodle.  “I have been wanting a subject,” said Roderick:  “there ’s one made to my hand!  And now for work!”

They saw no more of the young girl, though Roderick looked hopefully, for some days, into the carriages on the Pincian.  She had evidently been but passing through Rome; Naples or Florence now happily possessed her, and she was guiding her fleecy companion through the Villa Reale or the Boboli Gardens with the same superb defiance of irony.  Roderick went to work and spent a month shut up in his studio; he had an idea, and he was not to rest till he had embodied it.  He had established himself in the basement of a huge, dusky, dilapidated old house, in that long, tortuous, and preeminently Roman street which leads from the Corso to the Bridge of St. Angelo.  The black archway which admitted you might have served as the portal of the Augean stables, but you emerged presently upon a mouldy little court, of which the fourth side was formed by a narrow terrace, overhanging the Tiber.  Here, along the parapet, were stationed half a dozen shapeless fragments of sculpture, with