overcome by these sketches on a first view, and after she had pinned them
up on the walls of her bedroom (she had made no scruple over an immediate
individual appropriation) she was obliged to acknowledge that you had to
step back some little distance in order to "get them."

Then there was his year at Milan, during which he was engaged in the
cultivation of his voice at the Conservatory. "A whole year," said
innocent Jane to herself; "think of Dick's staying in one place as long
as that!" She made no account of the easily accessible joys of Monte
Carlo, but figured him, instead, as running interminable scales at all
hours of day and night, and as participating, now and then, in the chorus
at the Scala, for which purpose, as he wrote her, he had had a pair
of tights made to order. In another letter he sent her a pen-and-ink
sketch of himself as he appeared while studying the last act of
"Favorita." He explained that the large looking-glasses surrounding him
were designed to give the disillusioned Fernando opportunity to see
whether his facial expression was corresponding to the nature of the
music he was interpreting.

All this completely overpowered poor Jane; it enveloped her brother's
head in a roseate halo; it wrapped him in the sweet and voluminous folds
of a never-failing incense; it imparted a warm glow to his coolish summer
in the Engadine, and it illumined his archaeological prowlings through
the Peloponnesus; it opened up a dozen diverging vistas to the
enthusiastic girl herself, and advanced her rapidly in long courses of
expansion and improvement. Above all, it filled her with a raging
impatience for his return. "Between him and me," she would say to
herself, "something _may_ be done. Pa'll never do anything to get us out
of this rut; nor ma. Neither will Roger nor Alice. And Rosy--well, Rosy's
too young to count on, yet. But Richard Truesdale Marshall, the younger