"Very," said Colville. He was wondering whether this were the kind of talk that he thought was literary when he was a young fellow. "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?"