“I didn’t mean that your tone was in the least offensive.”

“A more polite tone, then—­as you taught me yesterday.”

“I had rather you spoke just as is natural to you.”

Mallard laughed.

“Politeness is not natural to me, I admit.  I am horribly uncomfortable whenever I have to pick my words out of regard to polite people.  That is why I shun what is called society.  What little I have seen of it has been more than enough for me.”

“I have seen still less of it; but I understand your dislike.”

“Before you left home, didn’t you associate a great deal with people?”

“People of a certain kind,” she replied coldly.  “It was not society as you mean it.”

“You will be glad to mix more freely with the world, when you are back in England?”

“I can’t tell.  By whom is that Madonna?”

Thus they went slowly on, until they came to the little hall where the fountain plays, and whence is the outlook over the Tiber.  It was delightful to sit here in the shadows, made cooler and fresher by that plashing water, and to see the glorious sunlight gleam upon the river’s tawny flow.

“Each time that I have been in Rome,” said Mallard, “I have felt, after the first few days, a peculiar mental calm.  The other cities of Italy haven’t the same effect on me.  Perhaps every one experiences it, more or less.  There comes back to me at moments the kind of happiness which I knew as a boy—­a freedom from the sense of duties and responsibilities, of work to be done, and of disagreeable things to be faced; the kind of contentment I used to have when I was reading lives of artists, or looking at prints of famous pictures, or myself trying to draw.  It is possible that this mood is not such a strange one with many people as with me, when it comes, I feel grateful to the powers that rule life Since boyhood, I have never known it in the north.  Out of Rome, perhaps only in fine weather on the Mediterranean.  But in Rome is its perfection.”

“I thought you preferred the north,” said Miriam.

“Because I so often choose to work there?  I can do better work when I take subjects in wild scenery and stern climates, but when my thoughts go out for pleasure, they choose Italy.  I don’t enjoy myself in the Hebrides or in Norway, but what powers I have are all brought out there.  Hero I am not disposed to work.  I want to live, and I feel that life can be a satisfaction in itself without labour.  I am naturally the idlest of men.  Work is always pain to me.  I like to dream pictures; but it’s terrible to drag myself before the blank canvas.”

Miriam gazed at the Tiber.

“Do these palaces,” he asked, “ever make you wish you owned them?  Did you ever imagine yourself walking among the marbles and the pictures with the sense of this being your home?”

“I have wondered what that must be.  But I never wished it had fallen to my lot.”