Roderick was sitting with his knees drawn up and bent, and his hands clapsed around his legs. He bent his head and rested his forehead on his knees. Christina went on with a sort of infernal calmness: “I believe that, really, you don’t greatly care for your friend in America any more than you do for me. You are one of the men who care only for themselves and for what they can make of themselves. That ‘s very well when they can make something great, and I could interest myself in a man of extraordinary power who should wish to turn all his passions to account. But if the power should turn out to be, after all, rather ordinary? Fancy feeling one’s self ground in the mill of a third-rate talent! If you have doubts about yourself, I can’t reassure you; I have too many doubts myself, about everything in this weary world. You have gone up like a rocket, in your profession, they tell me; are you going to come down like the stick? I don’t pretend to know; I repeat frankly what I have said before--that all modern sculpture seems to me weak, and that the only things I care for are some of the most battered of the antiques of the Vatican. No, no, I can’t reassure you; and when you tell me--with a confidence in my discretion of which, certainly, I am duly sensible--that at times you feel terribly small, why, I can only answer, ‘Ah, then, my poor friend, I am afraid you are small.’ The language I should like to hear, from a certain person, would be the language of absolute decision.” Roderick raised his head, but he said nothing; he seemed to be exchanging a long glance with his companion. The result of it was to make him fling himself back with an inarticulate murmur. Rowland, admonished by the silence, was on the point of turning away, but he was arrested by a gesture of the young girl. She pointed for a moment into the blue air. Roderick followed the direction of her gesture. “Is that little flower we see outlined against that dark niche,” she asked, “as intensely blue as it looks through my veil?” She spoke apparently with the amiable design of directing the conversation into a less painful channel. Rowland, from where he stood, could see the flower she meant--a delicate plant of radiant hue, which sprouted from the top of an immense fragment of wall some twenty feet from Christina’s place. Roderick turned his head and looked at it without answering. At last, glancing round, “Put up your veil!” he said. Christina complied. “Does it look as blue now?” he asked. “Ah, what a lovely color!” she murmured, leaning her head on one side. “Would you like to have it?” She stared a moment and then broke into a light laugh. “Would you like to have it?” he repeated in a ringing voice. “Don’t look as if you would eat me up,” she answered. “It ‘s harmless if I say yes!”