up the stream of his thoughts. And, next, it was the conviction of
thine understanding that a little society and boon companionship, and
the proud pleasure of showing his ruins and presiding at the hall of his
forefathers, would take Roland out of those gloomy reveries into which
he still fell at times. And, thirdly, for us young people, ought not
Blanche to find companions in children of her own sex and age? Already
in those large black eyes there was something melancholy and brooding,
as there is in the eyes of all children who live only with their elders.
And for Pisistratus, with his altered prospects, and the one great
gnawing memory at his heart,--which he tried to conceal from himself,
but which a mother (and a mother who had loved) saw at a glance,--what
could be better than such union and interchange with the world around
us, small though that world might be, as woman, sweet binder and blender
of all social links, might artfully effect? So that thou didst not go,
like the awful Florentine,--

"Sopra for vanita che par persona,"--

"over thin shadows that mocked the substance of real forms," but rather
it was the real forms that appeared as shadows, or vanita.

What a digression! Can I never tell my story in a plain,
straightforward way? Certainly I was born under Cancer, and all my
movements are circumlocutory, sideways, and crab-like.




CHAPTER V.