They went, and not only once.  That was the beginning of another phase; a period when, as he began to take up life again, he turned to his old friends to help him do it.  He saw almost no one else, certainly no one else there, for he was sure to disappear upon the arrival of a caller, or the announcement of an expedition in which other people were included.  But he returned again and again to the Louvre with them, his theory of galleries necessitating frequent visits.  Nothing could be more idiotic, he held, than to try to see on one occasion all, or even half, or even a tenth part, of a great collection of works of art.  “It is exactly as reasonable,” he contended, “as to read through on the same day every poem in a great anthology.  Who could have anything but nausea for poetry after such a gorge?  And they must hate pictures or else be literally blind to them, the people who look at five hundred in a morning!  If I had looked at every picture in the Long Gallery in one walk through it, I should thrust my cane through the Titian Francis-First itself when I came to the Salon Carre.”

So he took them to see only a few, five or six, carefully selected things—­there was one wonderful day when he showed them nothing but the Da Vinci Saint Anne, and the Venus of Melos, comparing the dissimilar beauty of those two divine faces so vitally, that Sylvia for days afterwards, when she closed her eyes and saw them, felt that she looked on two living women.  She told them this and, “Which one do you see most?” he asked her.  “Oh, the Saint Anne,” she told him.

He seemed dissatisfied.  But she did not venture to ask him why.  They lived in an atmosphere where omissions were vital.

Sylvia often wondered in those days if there ever had been a situation so precariously balanced which continued to hang poised and stable, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day.  There were moments when her head was swimming with moral dizziness.  She wondered if such moments ever came to the two quiet, self-controlled men who came and went, with cordial, easy friendliness, in and out of the appartement on the Rue de Presbourg.  They gave no sign of it, they gave no sign of anything beyond the most achieved appearance of a natural desire to be obliging and indulgent to the niece of an old friend.  This appearance was kept up with such unflagging perseverance that it almost seemed consciously concerted between them.  They so elaborately avoided the slightest appearance of rivalry that their good taste, like a cloth thrown over an unknown object, inevitably excited curiosity as to what was concealed beneath it.