He
told her that she was what is called in French a sournoise. "Very good,"
she answered, almost indifferently, "and now please tell me again--I
have forgotten it--what you said an 'architrave' was."
It was on the occasion of her asking him a question of this kind that
he charged her, with a humorous emphasis in which, also, if she had
been curious in the matter, she might have detected a spark of restless
ardor, with having an insatiable avidity for facts. "You are always
snatching at information," he said; "you will never consent to have any
disinterested conversation."
She frowned a little, as she always did when he arrested their talk upon
something personal. But this time she assented, and said that she knew
she was eager for facts. "One must make hay while the sun shines," she
added. "I must lay up a store of learning against dark days. Somehow,
my imagination refuses to compass the idea that I may be in Rome
indefinitely."
He knew he had divined her real motives; but he felt that if he might
have said to her--what it seemed impossible to say--that fortune
possibly had in store for her a bitter disappointment, she would have
been capable of answering, immediately after the first sense of pain,
"Say then that I am laying up resources for solitude!"
But all the accusations were not his.
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