n their arrival in Rome, by Ralph; but though she held it in
her lap with her finger vaguely kept in the place she was not impatient
to pursue her study. A lamp covered with a drooping veil of pink
tissue-paper burned on the table beside her and diffused a strange pale
rosiness over the scene.

"You say you'll come back; but who knows?" Gilbert Osmond said.

"I think you're much more likely to start on your voyage round the
world. You're under no obligation to come back; you can do exactly what
you choose; you can roam through space."

"Well, Italy's a part of space," Isabel answered. "I can take it on the
way."

"On the way round the world? No, don't do that. Don't put us in a
parenthesis--give us a chapter to ourselves. I don't want to see you on
your travels. I'd rather see you when they're over. I should like to see
you when you're tired and satiated," Osmond added in a moment. "I shall
prefer you in that state."

Isabel, with her eyes bent, fingered the pages of M. Ampere. "You turn
things into ridicule without seeming to do it, though not, I think,
without intending it. You've no respect for my travels--you think them
ridiculous."

"Where do you find that?"

She went on in the same tone, fretting the edge of her book with the
paper-knife. "You see my ignorance, my blunders, the way I wander about
as if the world belonged to me, simply because--because it has been put
into my power to do so. You don't think a woman ought to do that. You
think it bold and ungraceful."

"I think it beautiful," said Osmond. "You know my opinions--I've treated
you to enough of them. Don't you remember my telling you that one ought
to make one's life a work of art? You looked rather shocked at first;
but then I told you that it was exactly what you seemed to me to be
trying to do with your own."

She looked up from her book. "What you despise most in the world is bad,
is stupid art."

"Possibly. But yours seem to me very clear and very good."

"If I were to go to Japan next winter you would laugh at me," she went
on.

Osmond gave a smile--a keen one, but not a laugh, for the tone of their
conversation was not jocose. Isabel had in fact her solemnity; he had
seen it before. "You have one!"

"That's exactly what I say. You think such an idea absurd."

"I would give my little finger to go to Japan; it's one of the countries
I want most to see. Can't you believe that, with my taste for old
lacquer?"

"I haven't a taste