so that you 'll get another better one in some other time and
place. Will it be a sin to make the most of that one too, I wonder; and
shall we have to be bribed off in the future state, as well as in the
present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty--I don't know; I delight
in it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to produce it, to
reproduce it. My wife holds that we shouldn't think too much about it
She's always afraid of that, always on her guard. I don't know what she
has got on her back! And she's so pretty, too, herself! Don't you think
she's lovely? She was, at any rate, when I married her. At that time I
was n't aware of that difference I speak of--I thought it all came to
the same thing: in the end, as they say. Well, perhaps it will, in the
end. I don't know what the end will be. Moreover, I care for seeing
things as they are; that's the way I try to show them in my novels. But
you must n't talk to Mrs. Ambient about things as they are. She has a
mortal dread of things as they are."

"She's afraid of them for Dolcino," I said: surprised a moment
afterwards at being in a position--thanks to Miss Ambient--to be so
explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark should n't have shown
visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it But he did n't;
he simply exclaimed, with a tenderness that touched me,--

"Ah, nothing shall ever hurt _him!_" He told me more about his wife
before we arrived at the gate of his house, and if it be thought that he
was querulous, I am afraid I must admit that he had some of the foibles
as well as the gifts of the artistic temperament; adding, however,
instantly, that hitherto, to the best of my belief, he had very rarely
complained. "She thinks me immoral--that's the long and short of it," he
said, as we paused outside a moment, and his hand rested on one of
the bars of his gate; while his conscious, demonstrative, expressive,
perceptive eyes,--the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them,
much more than of the usual Englishman,--viewing me now evidently
as quite a familiar friend, took part in the declaration. "It's very
strange, when one thinks it all over, and there's a grand comicality
in it which I should like to bring out. She is a very nice woman,
extraordinarily well behaved, upright and clever, and with a tremendous
lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her conception of a
novel--she has explained it to me once or twice, and she does n't do it