V
One warm, still day, late in the Roman autumn, our two young men were seated beneath one of the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi. They had been spending an hour in the mouldy little garden-house where the colossal mask of the famous Juno looks out with blank eyes from that dusky corner which must seem to her the last possible stage of a lapse from Olympus. Then they had wandered out into the gardens and were lounging away the morning under the spell, as it seemed to them, of supreme romance. Roderick declared that he would go nowhere else, that after the Juno it was a profanation to look at anything but sky and trees. There was a fresco of Guercino, to which Rowland, though he had seen it on his former visit to Rome, went dutifully to pay his respects. But Roderick, though he had never seen it, declared that it couldn't be worth a fig and that he didn't care to look at ugly things. He remained stretched on his overcoat, which he had spread on the grass, while Rowland went off envying the intellectual comfort of genius, which can arrive at serene conclusions without disagreeable processes. When the latter came back his friend was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Rowland, in the geniality of a mood attuned to all the stored patiences that lurk in Roman survivals,
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