She had begun to feel a little out of this gay stranger’s intimacy. It seemed to Rose as if Léon purposely avoided her, and yet, in a way, which was very strange to her, their eyes sometimes met, and then he seemed to be telling her something as direct as a penny and as articulate as the cobblestones of Rome. Then all of a sudden, breathlessly, without preparation, she found herself alone with him in the Campagna. Mr. Pinsent had said that the girls were on no account to go outside the walls of Rome by themselves. He hadn’t made it perfectly clear why he put this obstacle to their general freedom, but he’d mentioned when pressed by Agatha, malarial fever and savage Abruzzi sheep dogs. “So I expect I shall just have to go to a gallery instead,” Rose explained to Léon in the hall. “Edith has gone off with some one to see a fountain, and won’t be back for hours.” Léon hesitated, then he said, “How far does the wonderful English freedom extend? Is it an impertinence that I should offer to take you--wherever you wish to go?” “Oh, thank you very much. Yes, of course I could go with you. . . .” Rose answered a little slowly. It seemed to her in some strange way that her freedom had ceased to be menaced by her father and mother, but not to have become any the more secure. She couldn’t have said that she disliked the sense of danger, but she knew quite well what increased it. It was Léon’s saying as they stood for a moment outside the street door, “Do you know it is since three days--I have been waiting for this?” They took the tram to San Giovanni Laterano, and as it shuffled and shrieked its clamorous way through narrow streets and wide piazzas, under old yellow walls and through long white modern tunnels, a new sensation came to Rose Pinsent. She had always supposed that what she liked best in a man was his being tremendously manly, and by manly the Pinsents meant impervious to the wills of others, abrupt in speech, and taking up everywhere a good deal of space. But Léon was masculine in quite a different way and yet no one could doubt his possessing that particular quality. The form it took with him was that Rose became suddenly conscious of his physical presence. She noticed as she had never noticed in any man before, his smallest personal habits, the flutter of his fine hard eyes, the scrupulous neatness and grace of his person, and, above all, the alert and faultless precision with which in any direction he met her half-way. He gave her from moment to moment the whole of his indulgent intensity. No man had ever looked at her like this before, so read her mind and forced her in return to read his own! The tram was crowded and Léon stood above her, holding on to a strap and looking down at her with laughing eyes. “You are thinking something of me, Mademoiselle,” he said at last. “Confess it is a comparison, not, of course, to my advantage. Tell me, then, to whom are you comparing me, in what do I fall short?”