Again she was silent.  They had walked on, through familiar streets that now seemed strange.

“You respond—­I can tell,” he said.  “And yet, you are not like these others, like me, even.  You are an American.  And yet you are not like most of your countrywomen.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I will tell you.  Because they are cold, most of them, and trivial, they do not feel.  But you—­you can feel, you can love and hate.  You look calm and cold, but you are not—­I knew it when I looked at you, when you came up to me.”

She did not know whether to resent or welcome his clairvoyance, his assumption of intimacy, his air of appropriation.  But her curiosity was tingling.

“And you?” she asked.  “Your name is Rolfe, isn’t it?”

He assented.  “And yours?”

She told him.

“You have been in America long—­your family?”

“Very long,” she said.  “But you speak Italian, and Rolfe isn’t an Italian name.”

“My father was an Englishman, an artist, who lived in Italy—­my mother a peasant woman from Lombardy, such as these who come to work in the mills.  When she was young she was beautiful—­like a Madonna by an old master.”

“An old master?”

“The old masters are the great painters who lived in Italy four hundred years ago.  I was named after one of them—­the greatest.  I am called Leonard.  He was Leonardo da Vinci.”

The name, as Rolfe pronounced it, stirred her.  And art, painting!  It was a realm unknown to her, and yet the very suggestion of it evoked yearnings.  And she recalled a picture in the window of Hartmann’s book-store, a coloured print before which she used to stop on her way to and from the office, the copy of a landscape by a California artist.  The steep hillside in the foreground was spread with the misty green of olive trees, and beyond—­far beyond—­a snow-covered peak, like some high altar, flamed red in the sunset.  She had not been able to express her feeling for this picture, it had filled her with joy and sadness.  Once she had ventured to enter and ask its price—­ten dollars.  And then came a morning when she had looked for it, and it was gone.

“And your father—­did he paint beautiful pictures, too?”

“Ah, he was too much of a socialist.  He was always away whey I was a child, and after my mother’s death he used to take me with him.  When I was seventeen we went to Milan to take part in the great strike, and there I saw the soldiers shooting down the workers by the hundreds, putting them in prison by the thousands.  Then I went to live in England, among the socialists there, and I learned the printer’s trade.  When I first came to this country I was on a labour paper in New York, I set up type, I wrote articles, and once in a while I addressed meetings on the East Side.  But even before I left London I had read a book on Syndicalism by one of the great Frenchmen, and after a while I began to realize that the proletariat would never get anywhere through socialism.”