snow-drifts above the purple heath; the distant harbour with its
freight of white marble going to sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus
Speciosa on its dark headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white
breakers. Even on summer nights the air there had always a motion in
it, and drove the scent of the new-mown hay along all the passages of
the house.

Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something
cloistral or monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite
order, made the whole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the
peculiar sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood,
provided the deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of
life which we can give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory
of them--the "subjective immortality," to use a modern phrase, for
which many a Roman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister
or daughter, still in the land of the living. Certainly, if any [21]
such considerations regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he
enjoyed that secondary existence, that warm place still left, in
thought at least, beside the living, the desire for which is
actually, in various forms, so great a motive with most of us. And
Marius the younger, even thus early, came to think of women's tears,
of women's hands to lay one to rest, in death as in the sleep of
childhood, as a sort of natural want. The soft lines of the white
hands and face, set among the many folds of the veil and stole of the
Roman widow, busy upon her needlework, or with music sometimes,
defined themselves for him as the typical expression of maternity.
Helping her with her white and purple wools, and caring for her
musical instruments, he won, as if from the handling of such things,
an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifying duly his country-grown
habits--the sense of a certain delicate blandness, which he relished,