Mrs. Light, who through her long, gold-cased glass was looking a little
at everything, and at nothing as if she saw it, interrupted her random
murmurs and exclamations, and surveyed Rowland from head to foot. She
looked at him all over; apparently he had not been mentioned to her as
a feature of Roderick's establishment. It was the gaze, Rowland felt,
which the vigilant and ambitious mamma of a beautiful daughter has
always at her command for well-dressed young men of candid physiognomy.
Her inspection in this case seemed satisfactory. "Are you also an
artist?" she inquired with an almost caressing inflection. It was clear
that what she meant was something of this kind: "Be so good as to assure
me without delay that you are really the young man of substance and
amiability that you appear."

But Rowland answered simply the formal question--not the latent one.
"Dear me, no; I am only a friend of Mr. Hudson."

Mrs. Light, with a sigh, returned to the statues, and after mistaking
the Adam for a gladiator, and the Eve for a Pocahontas, declared that
she could not judge of such things unless she saw them in the marble.
Rowland hesitated a moment, and then speaking in the interest of
Roderick's renown, said that he was the happy possessor of several of
his friend's works and that she was welcome to come and see them at his
rooms. She bade the Cavaliere make a note of his address. "Ah, you 're
a patron of the arts," she said. "That 's what I should like to be if
I had a little money. I delight in beauty in every form. But all these
people ask such monstrous prices. One must be a millionaire, to think
of such things, eh? Twenty years ago my husband had my portrait painted,
here in Rome, by Papucci, who was the great man in those days. I was in
a ball dress, with all my jewels, my neck and arms, and all that. The