He had read and he had dreamed, and he understood now that nothing in reality was what he had expected it to be. In the clear daylight everything seemed grey and hard, the dream had enveloped the pictures of his fancy in a soft chiaroscuro, had given them a harmonious finish, and covered the ruins with a delicate green. He would now only go round and make sure that everything he had read about was really there, and then he would be able to lecture on it to the young ladies at the Academy, and say that he had seen it. Not a single thing would he have to tell them that he had discovered for himself; he would learn nothing that he did not already know. And when he met living beings he conjured up in his mind the dead forms of poetry that he knew, to see if one of them were represented, for he knew nothing of the living, he who had never lived. Heggen with the full, red mouth would hardly—he supposed—dream of romantic adventure, like those one reads of in the popular novelettes, if he fell in with a girl one evening in the streets of Rome. He began to feel conscious of having drunk wine. “You will have a headache tomorrow if you go home now,” said Miss Winge to him, when they stood outside in the street. The other three walked ahead; he followed with her. “I am sure you think me an awful bore to take out of an evening.” “Not at all, but you do not know us well enough yet, and we don’t know you.” “I am slow at making acquaintances—in fact, I never really get to know people. I ought not to have come tonight, when you were kind enough to ask me. Perhaps one needs training to enjoy oneself too,” he said, with a short laugh. “Of course one does.” He could hear from her voice that she was smiling. “I was twenty-five when I started and, you can take it from me, I had no easy time at first.” “You? I thought that you artists always.... For that matter, I did not think you were twenty-five or near it.” “I am, thank goodness, and considerably more.” “Do you thank Heaven for that? And I, a man, for every year that drops from me as it were into eternity, without having brought me anything but the humiliation of finding that nobody has any use for me—I——” He stopped suddenly, terrified. He heard that his voice trembled, and he concluded that the wine had gone to his head, since he could speak like that to a woman he did not even know. But in spite of his shyness he went on: “It seems quite hopeless. My father has told me about the young men of his time, about their eager discussions and their great illusions. I have never had a single illusion to talk about all these years, that now are gone, lost, never to return.”