Part 57 (1/2)
She made delay before saying:
”It is long since I thought of it at all. I have been too busy learning the simplest things to trouble about the most difficult.”
”To learn, then, has been _your_ object all this time. Let me question you in turn. Do you find it all-sufficient?”
”No; because I have begun too late. I am doing now what I ought to have done when I was a girl, and I have always the feeling of being behindhand.”
”But the object, in itself, quite apart from your progress? Is it enough to study a variety of things, and feel that you make some progress towards a possible ideal of education? Does this suffice to your life?”
She answered confusedly:
”I can't know yet; I can't see before me clearly enough.”
Mallard was on the point of pressing the question, but he refrained, and shaped his thought in a different way.
”Do you think of remaining in England?”
”Probably I shall.”
”You will return to your home in Lancas.h.i.+re?”
”I haven't yet determined,” she replied formally.
The dialogue seemed to be at an end. Un.o.bservant of each other, they reached the Via Crucis, which leads up to S. Pietro in Montorio.
Arrived at the terrace, they stood to look down on Rome.
”After all, you are tired,” said Mallard, when he had glanced at her.
”Indeed I am not.”
”But you are hungry. We have been forgetting that it is luncheon-time.”
”I pay little attention to such hours. One can always get something to eat.”
”It's all very well for people like myself to talk in that way,” said Mallard, with a smile, ”but women have orderly habits of life.”
”For which you a little despise them?” she returned, with grave face fixed on the landscape.
”Certainly not. It's only that I regard their life as wholly different from my own. Since I was a boy, I have known nothing of domestic regularity.”
”You sometimes visit your relatives?”
”Yes. But their life cannot be mine. It is domestic in such a degree that it only serves to remind me how far apart I am.”
”Do you hold that an artist cannot live like other people, in the habits of home?”
”I think such habits are a danger to him. He _may_ find a home, if fate is exceptionally kind.”
Pointing northwards to a ridged hill on the horizon, he asked in another voice if she knew its name.
”You mean Mount Soracte?”