"But it is perfectly possible for other people to live in Rome too! My dear child, a year in Rome at your age ... it will be the making of you! You will always bless your poor old de la Cueva who secured it for you. Youth, talent, beauty, Rome!" she drew the picture with envious admiration of its possibilities. There was no use trying to reason with her, as one would with any one else, Marise knew that from experience--no use trying to show the material, practical obstacles in the way. What would her father say? How could she go alone to Rome to live? Not that Mme. de la Cueva would have hesitated at any age to go anywhere alone to live--but she would not long have remained alone! How like Mme. de la Cueva to dispose of her so calmly! Even as Marise said all this to herself she was aware by a sudden warm gush of pleasure and excitement in her heart that she was delighted beyond measure with the plan, that she had been longing for some change in her life, that she had been growing deathly stale in the same old round, the absurdly life-and-death consultations with Biron in the kitchen, the same old professors at the Sorbonne with the same old glass of sugar-and-water and the same high-keyed nasal delivery of the same old lectures, even Mme. de la Cueva with her same old cliches about mass and bulk in the bass. She felt no guilt about this last, for if there were one person in the world who understood entirely the fatigue at the recurrence of the same old things, it was Mme. de la Cueva! The pianist looking at her young disciple with discerning and experienced eyes, saw something of this and smiled sympathetically. "You have been working, working, working, and now it is time to run a little free, my Marisette," she said, patting her hand, "you are ... how old?" "Twenty-one to-day," said Marise. "Exactly! As though Fate had timed it. Very likely Fate did." She had a great faith in Fate provided one did not hang back before the doors Fate set open before one. Personally she had never hesitated to step through every one that had been even ajar. "A year in Rome with the old Visconti, who has the most wonderful sense of rhythm of any man alive--the real, the living rhythm--the life, the personality of music! Make yourself a docile little pair of ears and nothing else when he talks to you of rhythm! And pay _no_ attention, none, do you hear, to his fingering! It is _infecte_, _ignoble_! Then after a year, I shall be here again to see what else you need before I launch you--good old Maman de la Cueva will be thinking of you all the time...." "But I am not in the least sure I can manage a year in Rome," protested Marise, breaking in with a hurried protest against this taking-for-granted of everything, "I never dreamed of going to Rome! My father...." "Oh, you can manage it," Madame de la Cueva assured her carelessly, "one can always manage whatever one really wants to do. Especially if it depends on a man."