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Rome.
One warm, still day, late in the Roman autumn, our two young men were sitting beneath one of the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi.
They had been spending an hour in the mouldy little garden-house, where the colossal mask of the famous Juno looks out with blank eyes from that dusky corner which must seem to her the last possible stage of a lapse from Olympus.

Then they had wandered out into the gardens, and were lounging away the morning under the spell of their magical picturesqueness.

Roderick declared that he would go nowhere else; that, after the Juno, it was a profanation to look at anything but sky and trees.

There was a fresco of Guercino, to which Rowland, though he had seen it on his former visit to Rome, went dutifully to pay his respects.
But Roderick, though he had never seen it, declared that it could n't be worth a fig, and that he did n't care to look at ugly things.