The simplest way to do so was to go in the autumn to
Rome, where Miss Osmond was domiciled with her family. Mr. Rosier
started on his pilgrimage to the Italian capital and reached it on the
first of November. It was a pleasant thing to do, but for the young
man there was a strain of the heroic in the enterprise. He might
expose himself, unseasoned, to the poison of the Roman air, which in
November lay, notoriously, much in wait. Fortune, however, favours the
brave; and this adventurer, who took three grains of quinine a day,
had at the end of a month no cause to deplore his temerity. He had
made to a certain extent good use of his time; he had devoted it in
vain to finding a flaw in Pansy Osmond's composition. She was
admirably finished; she had had the last touch; she was really a
consummate piece. He thought of her in amorous meditation a good
deal as he might have thought of a Dresden-china shepherdess. Miss
Osmond, indeed, in the bloom of her juvenility, had a hint of the
rococo which Rosier, whose taste was predominantly for that manner,
could not fail to appreciate. That he esteemed the productions of
comparatively frivolous periods would have been apparent from the
attention he bestowed upon Madame Merle's drawing-room, which,
although furnished with specimens of every style, was especially
rich in articles of the last two centuries.
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