“It’s hardly a divorce,” he said, laughing.  “I think it’s separation by mutual consent.”

“That’s a pity,” said she, “life is so lovable.”

“I don’t always find it either lovable or loving.  But then it’s life in a fifth-rate boarding-house in Bloomsbury—­if you know what that is.”

She did not know what that was, and her silence suggested that she conceived it to be something too unpleasant to discuss with him.

“I work eight hours a day in my father’s shop—­”

“And when your work is done?”

“I go back to the boarding-house and dine.”

“And after dinner?”

Mr. Rickman became visibly embarrassed.  “Oh, after dinner, there are the streets, and the theatres, and—­and things.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing.  Except a club I belong to.”

“That’s something, isn’t it?  You make friends.”

“I don’t know anybody in it, except Mr. Jewdwine; and I don’t really know him.  It’s the shop, you know.  You forget the shop.”

“No I don’t forget it; but I wish you would.  If only you could get away from it, away from everything.  If you could get away from London altogether for a while.”

“If—­if?  I shall never get away.”

“Why not?  I’ve been thinking it over.  I wonder whether things could not be made a little easier for you?  You ought to make your peace with the world, you know.  Supposing you could go and live where the world happens to be beautiful, in Rome or Florence or Venice, wouldn’t that reconcile you to reality?”

“It might.  But I don’t see how I’m to go and live there.  You see there’s the shop.  There always is the shop.”

“Would it be impossible to leave it for a little while?”

“Not impossible, perhaps; but”—­he smiled, “well—­highly imprudent.”

“But if something else were open to you?”

“Nothing else is, at present.  Most doors seem closed pretty tight except the one marked Tradesmen’s Entrance.”

“You can’t ‘arrive’ by that.”

“Not, I admit, with any dignity.  My idea was to walk up the steps—­there are a great many steps, I know—­to the big front door and keep on knocking at it till they let me in.”

“I’m afraid the front door isn’t always open very early in the day.  But there may be side doors.”

“I don’t know where to find them.  And if I did, they would be bolted, too.”

“Not the one I am thinking of.  Would you like to go abroad, to Italy?”

“There are a great many things I should like to do, and not the remotest chance of doing them.”

“Supposing that you got the chance, some way—­even if it wasn’t quite the best way—­would you take it?”

“The chance?  I wish I saw one!”

“I think I told you I was going abroad to join my father.  We shall be in Italy for some time.  When we are settled, in Rome, for the winter, I shall want a secretary.  I’m thinking of editing my grandfather’s unpublished writings, and I can’t do this without a scholar’s help.  It struck me that if you want to go abroad, and nothing better turns up, you might care to take this work for a year.  For the sake of seeing Italy.”