He now said, judicially, "As far as I personally go, it depends what I'm looking at. If I'm looking at a very fine statue or something that seems really beautiful to me, I want as good a light as possible to see it in. If--if I should ever have any personal happiness in my life, I'd want daylight to see it by. But when it's a question of looking at the interior decoration of the average modern church, why, the more mystery and twilight the better." This made Marise laugh. He often made her laugh, more than she had ever laughed before. And yet he never told funny stories. He now went on, "I suppose it depends on your opinion of what there is to see. If you think your imagination can do better for you than reality, of course you want a lot left to it, and plenty of dark corners for it to work in. Just now, it seems to me that reality is so much beyond anything my poor, starved imagination could have done...." He did not look at Marise as he spoke. His tone was perfectly matter of fact. She wondered what the other two made out of it. She knew very well what she made out of it. VII They were sitting on the terrazza in the evening, with several other people from the _pension_, having their coffee sociably around the big round table and looking out over the roofs and domes and church-towers of Rome. The conversation had been chit-chat, as was usual during meal-times, and Mr. Crittenden had contributed little to it. His massive capacity for silence when he had nothing special to say was a constant source of wonder to Marise. Not to "make talk," even very commonplace talk, was a betrayal of a tacitly accepted code as much as calling Donna Antonia a "bad-tempered, stupid old woman." She had been taught that it was one of the pretenses which must be kept up under penalty of the ruin of all civilized intercourse. She envied and resented his freedom from it. She addressed herself directly to him now to force him out of his reflective taciturnity. "Do you agree to that, Mr. Crittenden?" "To what?" he asked, making no decent pretense of being abashed because he had not been following the conversation. "Why, Mr. Livingstone was saying that artists are the only human beings to be envied, the only human beings who really _live_, intensely."