Rowland tried at times to make her talk about herself, but in this she had little skill.  She seemed to him so much older, so much more pliant to social uses than when he had seen her at home, that he had a desire to draw from her some categorical account of her occupation and thoughts.  He told her his desire and what suggested it.  “It appears, then,” she said, “that, after all, one can grow at home!”

“Unquestionably, if one has a motive.  Your growth, then, was unconscious?  You did not watch yourself and water your roots?”

She paid no heed to his question.  “I am willing to grant,” she said, “that Europe is more delightful than I supposed; and I don’t think that, mentally, I had been stingy.  But you must admit that America is better than you have supposed.”

“I have not a fault to find with the country which produced you!” Rowland thought he might risk this, smiling.

“And yet you want me to change—­to assimilate Europe, I suppose you would call it.”

“I have felt that desire only on general principles.  Shall I tell you what I feel now?  America has made you thus far; let America finish you!  I should like to ship you back without delay and see what becomes of you.  That sounds unkind, and I admit there is a cold intellectual curiosity in it.”

She shook her head.  “The charm is broken; the thread is snapped!  I prefer to remain here.”

Invariably, when he was inclined to make of something they were talking of a direct application to herself, she wholly failed to assist him; she made no response.  Whereupon, once, with a spark of ardent irritation, he told her she was very “secretive.”  At this she colored a little, and he said that in default of any larger confidence it would at least be a satisfaction to make her confess to that charge.  But even this satisfaction she denied him, and his only revenge was in making, two or three times afterward, a softly ironical allusion to her slyness.  He told her that she was what is called in French a sournoise.  “Very good,” she answered, almost indifferently, “and now please tell me again—­I have forgotten it—­what you said an ‘architrave’ was.”

It was on the occasion of her asking him a question of this kind that he charged her, with a humorous emphasis in which, also, if she had been curious in the matter, she might have detected a spark of restless ardor, with having an insatiable avidity for facts.  “You are always snatching at information,” he said; “you will never consent to have any disinterested conversation.”

She frowned a little, as she always did when he arrested their talk upon something personal.  But this time she assented, and said that she knew she was eager for facts.  “One must make hay while the sun shines,” she added.  “I must lay up a store of learning against dark days.  Somehow, my imagination refuses to compass the idea that I may be in Rome indefinitely.”

He knew he had divined her real motives; but he felt that if he might have said to her—­what it seemed impossible to say—­that fortune possibly had in store for her a bitter disappointment, she would have been capable of answering, immediately after the first sense of pain, “Say then that I am laying up resources for solitude!”