The young mother’s face, softly banded with dark hair, rose flower-like above a lace collar, fastened at the throat by a large elliptical shell cameo representing Ganymede teasing the eagles of Jupiter. To the wearer that brooch was a pleasing and a precious thing. It had been her mother’s, and had been bought in Rome by her father, our first American translator of Tasso. Whether or not as an aid to his own understanding of the Italian poet, the New England scholar had married a gentle Sicilian girl, and Nancy herself had been born in Rome and christened Annunziata, an outlandish name that American relatives, after the scholar’s return, had promptly transformed into Nancy. And all her life Nancy had been conscious, not without joy, of her twofold nature as a New Englander and an Italian. Nancy and Annunziata were both of them under her skin. She never knew which one triumphed the oftener. In the kitchen, Nancy, perhaps; in the sitting-room, Annunziata. That evening, as she sewed her fine seam, the ample roseate sleeves of her gown and the white undersleeves flowing beneath them moved in and out of the lamplight in a kind of stately melody as for a minuet. Watching the child at his carving, she hoped and dreamed for him the life beautiful, the life of a sculptor. Had Raphael been there, she would have been a Madonna; a Madonna of the hoop-skirt, but not of the rocking-chair. No, indeed! The chair she sat in was one that her husband had made and carved for her, after a drawing in an ancient book on Italian furniture; its beauty and strength were a constant delight to her. And even without the chair, and the Ganymede, and the crimson curtains, it would have been evident that this young pair were among the aristocrats of the village; they felt that they belonged to the only aristocracy the place permitted, the aristocracy of mind. They had more books than the minister even. And no doubt Nancy’s birth in Rome, that far-off city where the Pope lives, had added a secretly savored pagan touch to the picture the hamlet had made of her.