When he took her up into the hills, into solitary places where the chestnut woods went on for miles and no one ever came but charcoal-burners, he was not, as it were, there. When he took her on the lake in a sailing-boat and they hung motionless on the goodwill of the wind, he was not there, either. When they rested after a hot climb, deep in some high meadow not yet reached by the ascending haymakers, and through the stalks of its bee-haunted flowers, its delicate bending scabious and frail ragged-robins, could see little bits of lake far below and the white villages on the mountains opposite, and the whole world was only asking to be made a frame of for love, where, he inquired of himself, in the picture that was in her mind and irradiating her eyes, was he? He had not imagined, so far behind him were his own discoveries of the new, that any one could be so greedily absorbed. Watching her, while she watched everything except him, he decided he would take her to Milan. He would try something ugly. Milan this heavy hot weather ought to give her back to him if anything would. They would stay in a street where there were tramcars and noises, and they would frequent museums. They would walk much on pavements, and have their food in English tea-rooms. While the cure was in progress she might be getting herself some decent clothes, for really her clothes were distressing, and when it was accomplished, and she was thoroughly bored with things, and had come back to being aware of him, he would carry her off to Venice and begin work--work, the best thing in life, the one thing that keeps on yet is never monotonous, the supreme thing always new and joyful. But he was afraid of Venice. Venice was too beautiful. She would not sit quiet there while he painted her; she would want to go out and look. Impossible to take her there until she had learned to blot out everything in the world with his image alone. This blotting out, he perceived, would have to be achieved in Milan, and quickly. He was starving for his work. So acute was his hunger to begin the great picture that right underneath all his other emotions and wishes and moods was a violent impatience at being kept from it by what his subconsciousness alluded to with resentful incorrectness as a parcel of women. It was the evening at Luino that he definitely decided on Milan.