Giovanni unlocked the door for them, received orders for the next day, and they went up the stairs together in silence. And as they went up all the womanhood in Dora—and there was much of it, and it was all sweet and good—rose, flooding for the time the bitter gray mud flats that had appeared. And at the top of the stairs she turned to him.
“Oh, Claude,” she said, “we’re not quarrelling, are we?”
“Takes two to make a quarrel,” he said, “and I’m not one. But I want to say something yet, and I think you’d better hear it. I ask you to, in fact.”
She unpinned her hat, and led the way to the end of the big sala that overlooked the canal. She sat down in her accustomed chair, flinging the window open, for the night was very hot.
“Say it then,” she said.
Again Claude’s head went back: he felt perfectly certain he was right.
“Well, it’s just this. You’ve told me not to choose my words, so I won’t bother to do so. You haven’t felt right toward the pater and mater all this time here. When he wanted to go and see a factory, you wondered at him—and, yes, you despised him a bit for it. When he admired some picture you didn’t think much of, you wondered again. Now, he never wondered at you. If you wanted to sit half an hour before some adoring Doge, he never wondered, any more than I wonder, for there are lots of people in the world, and they’ve got their different tastes and every right to them. But he only said to himself: ‘Gosh, there’s something there, and she’s right, only I don’t know what it is she’s looking at.’ He never thought you wanting in perception because you didn’t admire the iron in the fish market. He only thought to himself, ‘Let’s go and see something this afternoon that Dora does like.’ How often has he gone to the National Gallery in London? Never, you bet: he doesn’t know a picture from a statue. And how often has he gone to look at some mouldy old Titian here, because you thought it worth a look? Well, isn’t that anything? It’s no use you and me not saying things straight out, and so I say it straight out. He’s been boring himself fit to burst over your Botticellis, and been trying to admire them, saying this was the biggest picture he’d ever seen, and this was the smallest. And yet dear old Dad wasn’t boring himself, because he was with you, and trying to take an interest in what you showed him. Well then, I ask you!”
There, close in front of her, was the beautiful face, the beautiful mouth which she loved, saying things which, as far as they went, her essential nature entirely approved. But at the moment his beauty did not move her. And the account he had given was correct: she had been having on her nerves the fact that Mr. Osborne took more pleasure in the steamboats than in San Rocco, in the fish market than in the Frati. He might be right: she might be right, but in any case the attitudes were incompatible. And Claude at the moment clearly took up the attitude that was incompatible with hers. There was much more, too, he did not see: he did not see that indifference on Dora’s part did not destroy his father’s pleasure in the speed of the steamboats, whereas his artistic criticisms blackened her pictures for her.
And then, womanlike again, she knew only that Claude was her man, that he was beautiful, that he loved her....
“I dare say I am quite wrong,” she said. “I dare say you are quite right. Shall we leave it, then, darling? I will try—I will try to do better. I am sorry.”