They were on the shoulder of a mountain. Below them smaller foothills receded, tier below tier, until they sank imperceptibly into the level plain of the Campagna. Ahead of them the bare Sabines stretched in broken ridges, backed in the distance by two snow-peaks of the Apennines. Everywhere was the warmth of colouring, the brilliant hues of an Italian spring. ‘Italy is beautiful, isn’t it?’ Marcia asked simply. ‘Yes,’ he agreed; ‘Italy is cursed with beauty.’ She turned her eyes inquiringly from the landscape to him. ‘A nation of artists’ models!’ he exclaimed half contemptuously. ‘Because of their fatal good looks, the Italians can’t be allowed to be prosperous like any other people.’ ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘their beauty is a compensation. They are poor, I know; but don’t you think they know how to be happy in spite of it?’ ‘They are too easily happy. That’s another curse.’ ‘But you surely don’t want them to be unhappy,’ she remonstrated. ‘Since they have to be poor, shouldn’t you rather see them contented?’ ‘Certainly not. They have nothing to be contented with.’ ‘But I don’t see that it makes any difference _what_ you are contented with so long as you _are_ contented.’ He looked at her with a half-smile. ‘Nonsense, Miss Marcia; you know better than that. When people are contented with their lot, does their lot ever improve? Do you think the Italian people _ought_ to be happy? You have seen the way they live, or—no,’ he broke off, ‘you don’t know anything about it.’ ‘Yes, I do,’ she returned. ‘I know they’re poor—horribly poor—but they seem to get a good deal of pleasure out of life in spite of it.’ He shook his head. ‘You can’t convince me with that argument. Have you never heard of a holy discontent? That’s what these people need—and,’ he added grimly, ‘some of them have got it.’ ‘A holy discontent,’ she repeated. ‘What a terrible thing to have! It’s like living for revenge.’ ‘Oh, well,’ he shrugged, ‘a man must live for something besides his three meals a day.’ ‘He can live for his family,’ she suggested. ‘Yes, if he has one. Otherwise he must live for an idea.’ She glanced at him sidewise. She would have liked to ask what idea he lived for, but it was a question she did not dare to put. Instead she commented: ‘It’s queer, isn’t it, how the ideas that men used to live for have passed away? Chivalry and crusading and going to war and living as hermits—I really don’t see what’s left.’ ‘The most of the old ideals are exploded,’ he agreed. ‘But we have new ones to-day—sufficiently bad—to meet the needs of the present century. A man can make a god of his business, for instance.’ Marcia shifted her seat a trifle uneasily as she thought of her father, who certainly did make a god of his business. It may have struck Sybert that it was not a propitious subject, for he added almost instantly— ‘And there’s always art to fall back upon.’ ‘But you don’t object to that,’ she remonstrated.