necessity of making Rose's lover into a different man from the present
Edmund Grosse. It was absurd and medieval to suppose that if he did some
great or even moderately great work he could win her by doing it. It
might be absurd, yet contrariwise he felt convinced that she would never
take him as he was now.

So he wearied as he turned on the couch that became less and less
comfortable, till he rose and, with a rug thrown over him, leant on the
brick balustrade of the _loggia_. He stood looking at the stars in the
dimness, not wholly unlike the figure of some old Roman noble in his
toga, nor perhaps wholly unlike the figure of the unconverted Augustine,
weary of himself and of all things.

But this remark only shows how the stars and the deep blue openings into
the heavens, and the manifold suggestions of the towers of Dante's city,
and the neighbourhood of Savonarola's cell, affect the imagination and
call up comparisons by far too mighty. Edmund Grosse's weariness of evil
is nothing but a sickly shadow of the weariness of the great imprisoned
soul to whom an angel cried to take up and read aright the book of life.
Grosse is in fact only a middle-aged man in pajamas with a travelling
rug about his shoulders, with a sallow face, a sickly body, and a rather
shallow soul. He will not go quite straight even in his love quest, and
he cannot bring himself to believe how strongly that love has hold of
him. He is cynical about the best part of himself and to-night only
wishes that it would trouble him less.

"Damn it," he muttered at last, "I wish I had slept indoors--I am bored
to death by those stars!"

Next day Grosse set about the work for which he had come to Florence. He