“How perfectly weird the ‘Vision of Sin’ is!” Imogene continued. “Don’t you like weird things?”
“Weird things?” Colville reflected. “Yes; but I don’t see very much in them any more. The fact is, they don’t seem to come to anything in particular.”
“Oh, I think they do! I’ve had dreams that I’ve lived on for days. Do you ever have prophetic dreams?”
“Yes; but they never come true. When they do, I know that I didn’t have them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we are all so fond of the marvellous that we can’t trust ourselves about any experience that seems supernatural. If a ghost appeared to me I should want him to prove it by at least two other reliable, disinterested witnesses before I believed my own account of the matter.”
“Oh!” cried the girl, half puzzled, half amused. “Then of course you don’t believe in ghosts?”
“Yes; I expect to be one myself some day. But I’m in no hurry to mingle with them.”
Imogene smiled vaguely, as if the talk pleased her, even when it mocked the fancies and whims which, after so many generations that have indulged them, she was finding so fresh and new in her turn.
“Don’t you like to walk by the side of a river?” she asked, increasing her eager pace a little. “I feel as if it were bearing me along.”
“I feel as if I were carrying it,” said Colville. “It’s as fatiguing as walking on railroad ties.”
“Oh, that’s too bad!” cried the girl. “How can you be so prosaic? Should you ever have believed that the sun could be so hot in January? And look at those ridiculous green hillsides over the river there! Don’t you like it to be winter when it is winter?”
She did not seem to have expected anything from Colville but an impulsive acquiescence, but she listened while he defended the mild weather. “I think it’s very well for Italy,” he said. “It has always seemed to me—that is, it seems to me now for the first time, but one has to begin the other way—as if the seasons here had worn themselves out like the turbulent passions of the people. I dare say the winter was much fiercer in the times of the Bianchi and Neri.”
“Oh, how delightful! Do you really believe that?”
“No, I don’t know that I do. But I shouldn’t have much difficulty in proving it, I think, to the sympathetic understanding.”
“I wish you would prove it to mine. It sounds so pretty, I’m sure it must be true.”
“Oh, then, it isn’t necessary. I’ll reserve my arguments for Mrs. Bowen.”
“You had better. She isn’t at all romantic. She says it’s very well for me she isn’t—that her being matter-of-fact lets me be as romantic as I like.”
“Then Mrs. Bowen isn’t as romantic as she would like to be if she hadn’t charge of a romantic young lady?”
“Oh, I don’t say that. Dear me! I’d no idea it could be so hot in January.” As they strolled along beside the long hedge of laurel, the carriage slowly following them at a little distance, the sun beat strong upon the white road, blotched here and there with the black irregular shadows of the ilexes. The girl undid the pelisse across her breast, with a fine impetuosity, and let it swing open as she walked. She stopped suddenly. “Hark! What bird was that?”
“ ‘It was the nightingale, and not the lark,’ ” suggested Colville lazily.
“Oh, don’t you think Romeo and Juliet is divine?” demanded Imogene, promptly dropping the question of the bird.
“I don’t know about Romeo,” returned Colville, “but it’s sometimes occurred to me that Juliet was rather forth-putting.”
“You know she wasn’t. It’s my favourite play. I could go every night. It’s perfectly amazing to me that they can play anything else.”
“You would like it five hundred nights in the year, like Hazel Kirke? That would be a good deal of Romeo, not to say Juliet.”
“They ought to do it out of respect to Shakespeare. Don’t you like Shakespeare?”
“Well, I’ve seen the time when I preferred Alexander Smith,” said Colville evasively.
“Alexander Smith? Who in the world is Alexander Smith?”
“How recent you are! Alexander Smith was an immortal who flourished about the year 1850.”
“That was before I was born. How could I remember him? But I don’t feel so very recent for all that.”
“Neither do I, this morning,” said Colville. “I was up at one of Pharaoh’s balls last night, and I danced too much.”
He gave Imogene a droll glance, and then bent it upon Effie’s discreet face. The child dropped her eyes with a blush like her mother’s, having first sought provisional counsel of Imogene, who turned away. He rightly inferred that they all had been talking him over at breakfast, and he broke into a laugh which they joined in, but Imogene said nothing in recognition of the fact.
With what he felt to be haste for his relief she said, “Don’t you hate to be told to read a book?”
“I used to—quarter of a century ago,” said Colville, recognising that this was the way young people talked, even then.
“Used to?” she repeated. “Don’t you now?”
“No; I’m a great deal more tractable now. I always say that I shall get the book out of the library. I draw the line at buying. I still hate to buy a book that people recommend.”
“What kind of books do you like to buy?”
“Oh, no kind. I think we ought to get all our books out of the library.”
“Do you never like to talk in earnest?”
“Well, not often,” said Colville. “Because, if you do, you can’t say with a good conscience afterward that you were only in fun.”
“Oh! And do you always like to talk so that you can get out of things afterward?”
“No. I didn’t say that, did I?”
“Very nearly, I should think.”
“Then I’m glad I didn’t quite.”
“I like people to be outspoken—to say everything
