“I don’t say it would last forever; nothing does, for that matter. But at least you would live for a little while--come down off the unearthly plane you roost on now. Whatever you went through, it would leave you all-round developed and philosophical--in a frame of mind to see and accept life as it is. You need hardening. I was born hard. You’re as soft as mush, for all you look like those marble bores in the Vatican, and as romantic as if you’d spent all your life in a castle in a wood with the drawbridge up. I believe you even keep a diary----” “Diary----” Ora sat up straight. “I’ve seen and heard you writing by the yard, late at night, mostly. It wasn’t letters, because we always get those off our chest just after breakfast--fine system. Unless you’re a budding author----” “They were letters!” Ora, who was strung up to a high pitch and merely smoking for relief, felt a defiant impulse to indulge in the impudence of confession. “I’ve written yards and yards of letters to a man----” “What? And you don’t send them off!” “I don’t know him.” “Good lord, what next? An ideal, I suppose.” “Yes--that’s it.” “Do you mean you never saw him--anyone to suggest him--it? What gender has an ideal, anyhow?” “I saw him--talked with him, once. I said I didn’t know him.” “And you’re in love with him!” “Not in the least. He simply jolted my imagination, gave me the idea of what might be--have been. I--it is hard to express--I feel in a sort of mental--spiritual?--affinity with him. When I write I have a queer sense of absolute communion--as if we were talking--I suppose it is because I know he would understand if I could send the letters----” “And you’ve never sent one?” “Of course not. It is--well, just a little private one-sided drama I’m living; a sort of book of which I am the heroine. While I write I am alive. The rest of the time I wonder what I was put on this earth at all for.” “Look at here, Ora, the best thing we can do is to send for old Gower and go back to Rome. You’ll be having nerves first thing you know. No, we’d cut out the annex. I’m dead sick of her, and everybody knows we’re all right; in Rome they don’t care, anyhow. You could have a real romance. We’d take one of those old palaces, haunted, moth-eaten, with one of those antique porters that looks as if he’d let out midnight lovers ten centuries ago, and beds that twenty centuries have died in. That would just suit you. I’d enjoy a second-hand romance first rate, and be the trusted friend.” “Ida, you are incorrigible! Even if I cared a penny about Valdobia do you suppose I would betray my husband?” “Rats! Don’t you suppose Mark has a girl down on The Flat? Greg has, I’ll bet--well, don’t look as if you were going to faint. What’s the use of being a dog in the manger? Mark’ll be the same old devoted when you get back.”