“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 he 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?”

“Yes.  You don’t know Latin, or it would make you quote Horace.”

She shook her head, looked down, and spoke more humbly than he had ever yet heard her.

“But I know it in an English translation.”

“Well, that’s more than most women do.”

He said it in a grudging way.  The remark itself was scarcely civil, but he seemed all at once to have a pleasure in speaking roughly, in reminding her of her shortcomings.  Miriam turned her eyes in another quarter, and presently pointed to the far blue hills just seen between the Alban and the Sabine ranges.

“Through there is the country of the Volsci,” she said, in a subdued voice.  “Some Roman must have stood here and looked towards it, in days when Rome was struggling for supremacy with them.  Think of all that happened between that day and the time when Horace saw the snow on Soracte; and then, of all that has happened since.”

He watched her face, and nodded several times.  They pursued the subject, and reminded each other of what the scene suggested, point by point.  Mallard felt surprise, though he showed none.  Cecily, standing here, would have spoken with more enthusiasm, but it was doubtful whether she would have displayed Miriam’s accuracy of knowledge.

“Well, let us go,” he said at length.  “You don’t insist on walking home?”

“There is no need to, I think.  I could quite well, if I wished.”

“I am going to run through a few of the galleries for a morning or two.  I wonder whether you would care to come with me to-morrow?”

“I will come with pleasure.”

“That is how people speak when they don’t like to refuse a troublesome invitation.”

“Then what am I to say?  I spoke the truth, in quite simple words.”

“I suppose it was your tone; you seemed too polite.”

“But what is your objection to politeness?” Miriam asked naively.