"
"Then I have played my part very ill."
"Your part? What is your part supposed to have been?"
He hesitated a moment. "That of usefulness, pure and simple."
"I don't understand you!" she said; and picking up her Murray, she
fairly buried herself in it.
That evening he said something to her which necessarily increased her
perplexity, though it was not uttered with such an intention. "Do you
remember," he asked, "my begging you, the other day, to do occasionally
as I told you? It seemed to me you tacitly consented."
"Very tacitly."
"I have never yet really presumed on your consent. But now I would
like you to do this: whenever you catch me in the act of what you call
inconsistency, ask me the meaning of some architectural term. I will
know what you mean; a word to the wise!"
One morning they spent among the ruins of the Palatine, that sunny
desolation of crumbling, over-tangled fragments, half excavated and half
identified, known as the Palace of the Caesars. Nothing in Rome is more
interesting, and no locality has such a confusion of picturesque charms.
It is a vast, rambling garden, where you stumble at every step on the
disinterred bones of the past; where damp, frescoed corridors, relics,
possibly, of Nero's Golden House, serve as gigantic bowers, and where,
in the springtime, you may sit on a Latin inscription, in the shade of
a flowering almond-tree, and admire the composition of the Campagna.
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