He had given her question a good deal of thought, and yet when he took his hand down to speak he said abruptly, impulsively, as though the words had broken up through what he had been meaning to say, "Couldn't we ... any of us ... couldn't we hope to create a beautiful human relationship? Beautiful and enduring?" CHAPTER XLVIII Neale was in despair at his dumb helplessness before the inert resistance of social relations. A man with any adroitness would not submit passively to this sprung-up-from-nowhere tradition that he and Livingstone and Marise Allen and Eugenia Mills formed an indissoluble foursome, never to advance or retreat save in a solid bloc, like a French family, with all the uncles and cousins and aunts. How had it started? _He_ certainly had had nothing to do with it. That's what you got for being stiff-jointed and literal as he was about personal relations. The practised old hands ran circles around you, and had things all their own way. Such at least was the color of Neale's meditations when he was alone in his own room. When, as one of the quartet, he set off on a new expedition, he could think of nothing but his light-headed pleasure at being there at all, walking beside her, catching sidelong glimpses of her when he was supposed to be looking at a statue or a fresco, talking to her over the others' heads, trying to say something to _her_, through the infernally "general" conversation which Livingstone kept up as though his tongue were hung in the middle. And there was a certain advantage too--he was not flexible-minded enough to label it, but he recognized and was quick to profit by it--this parading around in a group gave the most intoxicating quality of intimacy to the brief, snatched occasions when he did manage to see her alone; even though a good many of these few precious moments were, as a matter of actual fact, passed on a noisy street-corner, waiting for a tram-car to come and carry her off, or on a narrow Roman sidewalk, trying to keep abreast of her as she stepped quickly through the dense, sauntering Italian crowd, stopping five deep to stare at something in a window, or holding noisy and affectionate family reunions on the sidewalk. None of that mattered. The noise, the clatter of tongues, the pressing and shoving of the crowd, the ear-piercing yells of the street-vendors--it was all essential silence to Neale because none of it was directed at keeping him apart from Marise, as was the low-toned urbane conversation of the sight-seeing quartet.