“No, I won’t,” said the girl obediently.
Wandering about a tangle of narrow streets, rugged, uneven, unchanged to all appearance from those Middle Ages when men’s lives and men’s thoughts were both simpler and more frankly expressed than in our subtler days, they found themselves in the central piazza, where Minerva’s columns have faced the sun of centuries. Wilbraham had made his way there the evening before, and had been so much impressed by their grandeur that he had looked forward to bringing Sylvia. This morning he said to himself that they were not what he had imagined them, and Sylvia hardly glanced in their direction, until he pointed them out.
“I see. They are very pretty,” she commented. “What did you call them?”
“They belonged to a temple of Minerva.”
Sylvia reflected.
“Then—” she hesitated—“they must be old, I suppose?”
“Very,” he said, smiling.
“Ah, I thought so. I know one used to learn something about Minerva in one’s lesson books.”
Wilbraham almost started. He had accepted the fact that Sylvia was rather unusually ignorant, but somehow or other until now Teresa had been there, to toss aside any wonder with a jest. It had never come before him in so staringly obtrusive a light. And Sylvia, anxious to prove her interest, went on gravely—
“Hadn’t she something to do with an owl?”