Rose tried to frown. “Why should you suppose I am thinking of you at all?” she ventured. Léon laughed softly. “Why indeed?” he murmured. “And yet why should you not? Here you are, you and I; we have not yet exchanged half-a-dozen words, and now we are to be together for, I hope, three hours, and all these last days I have been waiting for these hours--planning for them, arranging, as it were, my life to meet them. Surely you, who have not prevented my obtaining them, must now be giving a thought to what I am like? It would be droll to go for a ride on a strange horse and not to look at it, not question a little its character, how shall we put it--its pace? Would you think less of the companionship of a man?” Rose drew in her breath sharply. Léon had a way of putting things which was very exciting, but not, perhaps, quite nice. “But,” she said, “of course we have thought of you--Mother and Father, they thought you were--” she paused, breathless. Léon came to her assistance. “Respectable? Oh, yes,” he said easily. “But that doesn’t go very far, does it? Simply to go for an expedition with some one who is respectable! Your excellent Mr. Thomas Cook could provide you with that. You might even procure for a few francs more a gentleman to give you a lecture! Really, Mademoiselle, I had flattered myself that your imagination had dealt with me a trifle more directly!” Rose tacitly admitted this claim. “Agatha and Edith thought you awfully jolly,” she said hurriedly. “So I didn’t see, I mean I didn’t mind when you suggested coming out with me.” Léon laughed again. “But I am afraid,” he said, “that I sha’n’t be in the least with you what I was like with Mademoiselles Agatha and Edith--‘awfully jolly.’ I do not think of you in those terms. You will have to decide for yourself and not take anybody’s word for it what I am like to you.” Rose said nothing. She was glad that they had to get out at the foot of the Lateran steps. They took a little carriage which went very fast through the swollen, sallow suburb; it soon left behind it the trams, the cobblestones and the shuffling wine carts. Almost at once the Campagna was upon them, vaguely breaking away from the farms and the eucalyptus trees into soft-breathing, deep, unbroken emptiness. They wandered out over the grass to the ruin of a villa, an old pink tower and a group of umbrella pines. “It asks to be sketched, doesn’t it?” Léon observed. “And now you will have to be very definite, Mademoiselle. It won’t do for you to suppose that you can judge of the Campagna without a glance, as if it were merely a new masculine acquaintance!” He opened her camp-stool and gravely placed himself on an old wall behind her. “Vous y êtes,” he asserted, “begin!” But Rose didn’t begin. She had been thinking of what he had asked her. Perhaps she hadn’t been quite frank. The Pinsents as a family thought it a sin not to be quite frank.