said, laughing, and we all laughed. And then, as we two passed into the
narrow, twisted staircase to go down to the street, I heard Rebecca say
quietly, 'Did you hear what he said, Oscar? Did you, eh?'

"But, you know, I wanted to get clear of it all. I was more than ever
set upon it. I understood better than ever Rosa's vague dislike of a
life spent among the people she had known. It was nothing to me that
Rebecca and her husband were potential blackmailers or that little Mr.
Sachs, 'representing Babbolini's,' also represented a possible life-long
neighbour if we lived at Sampierdarena. It was Rosa who felt the
impossibility of it, and the subtle antagonisms of her environment. She
knew, though she had no words for it, that there was a fuller life for
us somewhere else. She would read an Italian translation of some English
book, _Barnaby Rudge_ or _The Old Curiosity Shop_, and when I came back
to her she would ask me about my country. I was often astonished to
find how little I knew about it! What I did know was out of books.
Humph!

"And what little I had known was fading voyage by voyage. Only rarely
was there time to go from the Tyne or the Wear or the Clyde to my home
in London. Coal is shipped and ore discharged in the North. But even the
North meant little to me beyond the staiths where the coal came down
from the pits, and the dirty, rain-swept back streets where the
shipping-offices were. Once or twice I tried to get quit of the ship and
went inland by rail. I saw cathedrals and castles and temperance hotels.
A bleak and unfriendly land! Somehow I could not find the key of it all.
Those sullen people living in the quaint streets round a superb
cathedral--_they_ were no kin of the men who built it or the men who
prayed and worshipped in it either. Indeed, you can often find the
cathedral empty and a sheet-iron shack round the corner near the
railroad full of men and women shouting their heads off. And the rich
people who lived in the castles had not much in common with the men who
built them. It wasn't, mind you, that I was envying these people or even
quarrelling with them. It wasn't that they were not orderly and
hard-working and conscientious. They were all that. No, it was a curious
impression they gave me of being only half alive. I used to watch them
in church, in saloons, in theatres, and they seemed oppressed by some
malign invisible fate standing over them and taking much of the sparkle
out of their