This pleasure-loving Tito Melema, "when he was only seven years old, Baldassarre had rescued from blows, had taken to a home that seemed like opened paradise, where there was sweet food and soothing caresses, all had on Baldassarre's knee; and from that time till the hour they had parted, Tito had been the one centre of Baldassarre's fatherly cares." Instead of finding and rescuing this man who, long years ago, had rescued Tito when a little boy from a life of beggary, filth, and cruel wrong, had reared him tenderly and been to him as a father, Tito sold the jewels which belonged to his father and would have been sufficient to ransom him from slavery, and finally, when found by Baldassarre in Florence, denied him and pronounced him a madman. He betrayed an innocent, trusting young girl into a mock marriage, at the same time ruining her and proving false to his lawful wife. He sold the library which it was Romola's father's dying wish to have kept in Florence as a distinct memorial to his life and work. He entered into selfish intrigues in the politics of the city, ready to betray his associates and friends whenever his own safety required it. What wonder that Romola came to have "her new scorn of that thing called pleasure which made men base--that dexterous contrivance for selfish ease, that shrinking from endurance and strain, when others were bowing beneath burdens too heavy for them, which now made one image with her husband." In her own distress she learns from Savonarola that there is a higher law than individual pleasure. "She felt that the sanctity attached to all close relations, and therefore preëminently to the closest, was but the expression in outward law, of that result toward which all human goodness and nobleness must spontaneously tend; that the light abandonment of ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had ceased to be pleasant, was the uprooting of social and personal virtue. What else had Tito's crime toward Baldassarre been but that abandonment working itself out to the most hideous extreme of falsity and ingratitude? To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the face of a law which is not unarmed with Divine lightnings--lightnings that may yet fall if the warrant has been false." The whole teaching of the book is summed up in the Epilogue. In the conversation between Romola and Tito's illegitimate son Lillo, Lillo says, "I should like to be something that would make me a great man, and very happy besides--something that would not hinder me from having a good deal of pleasure."