"But the object, in itself, quite apart from your progress? Is it enough to study a variety of things, and feel that you make some progress towards a possible ideal of education? Does this suffice to your life?" She answered confusedly: "I can't know yet; I can't see before me clearly enough." Mallard was on the point of pressing the question, but he refrained, and shaped his thought in a different way. "Do you think of remaining in England?" "Probably I shall." "You will return to your home in Lancashire?" "I haven't yet determined," she replied formally. The dialogue seemed to be at an end. Unobservant of each other, they reached the Via Crucis, which leads up to S. Pietro in Montorio. Arrived at the terrace, they stood to look down on Rome. "After all, you are tired," said Mallard, when he had glanced at her. "Indeed I am not." "But you are hungry. We have been forgetting that it is luncheon-time." "I pay little attention to such hours. One can always get something to eat." "It's all very well for people like myself to talk in that way," said Mallard, with a smile, "but women have orderly habits of life." "For which you a little despise them?" she returned, with grave face fixed on the landscape. "Certainly not. It's only that I regard their life as wholly different from my own. Since I was a boy, I have known nothing of domestic regularity." "You sometimes visit your relatives?" "Yes. But their life cannot be mine. It is domestic in such a degree that it only serves to remind me how far apart I am." "Do you hold that an artist cannot live like other people, in the habits of home?" "I think such habits are a danger to him. He _may_ find a home, if fate is exceptionally kind." Pointing northwards to a ridged hill on the horizon, he asked in another voice if she knew its name. "You mean Mount Soracte?" "Yes. You don't know Latin, or it would make you quote Horace." She shook her head, looked down, and spoke more humbly than he had ever yet heard her. "But I know it in an English translation." "Well, that's more than most women do." He said it in a grudging way. The remark itself was scarcely civil, but he seemed all at once to have a pleasure in speaking roughly, in reminding her of her shortcomings. Miriam turned her eyes in another quarter, and presently pointed to the far blue hills just seen between the Alban and the Sabine ranges. "Through there is the country of the Volsci," she said, in a subdued voice. "Some Roman must have stood here and looked towards it, in days when Rome was struggling for supremacy with them. Think of all that happened between that day and the time when Horace saw the snow on Soracte; and then, of all that has happened since."