"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?"