It was as if she had a special pleasure which never amounted to expectation in his presence. Her grave blue eyes never claimed him, but when he signaled his own joy into hers--he met with no rebuff. He had passed certain barriers with her and she made no attempt to set them up again. She was secretly afraid, not of him, but of being so different when they were alone together. She tried very hard to be just the same as she was when those queens of chaff, Agatha and Edith, presided over their small festivities. She had never supposed before you could have two relations with the same person, without doing anything wrong, and yet the most rigid of her scruples failed to warn her that when she and Léon were together they did anybody any harm. Rose would have stopped all “nonsense” at once; what she couldn’t stop was the gradual dangerous tenderness, growing touch by touch under the hand of a master. She tried not to think too much about Léon, and as long as he was with them she found that she succeeded. Everything became so interesting and so vivid--but when Léon was out of their sight, buried in obscure private affairs, hidden, perhaps, by his French relations whom he persistently excused to the Pinsents as being poor dear people, so terribly provincial and shy! Rose found Rome wonderfully little of an absorption--she was forced to consider that what she really needed was, like her sisters, some definite active goal. Her mind became set upon a hobby. She felt if she had that, it wouldn’t really matter whether Rome was interesting or not. She could not have told quite how the idea came to her; perhaps it was because little Italian children in the streets looked so sweet--but she suddenly thought she would like, when she got back to England, to have a nice little home in the country for children to get well in, quite poor people’s children--only they would be washed there, of course, and probably have curly hair. She told Léon about it one day when they were in St. Maria in Trastevere and had snatched a moment to go off by themselves into the sacristy, to admire what Baedeker so aptly describes as “the admirable ducks.” “Papa,” Rose explained to Léon, “had been so kind, he thought it could be managed.” For a moment Léon looked in silence at the admirable ducks--and then he laughed a gentle, caressing laugh and flushed a little, fixing his hard bright eyes on her upturned face. “But Mademoiselle,” he said, “hasn’t it occurred to you that to have your own children--nice little healthy ones--wouldn’t that be just as amusing and not quite as expensive for Papa?” It seemed as if Rose’s very heart had blushed under his eyes. She wanted for a moment to go away from him--to hide from out of his sight. She said quickly and vaguely, “Oh, I don’t know--one doesn’t think about such things.” Léon said, “Doesn’t one? I assure you I do.”