"You're a horrid boy. Why need we get married? It would alter nothing in our position. We still shouldn't trouble about other people. We are living so delightfully here, living for your art. We want nothing more than each other and your art and Rome. I am so very fond of Rome now; I am quite altered. There is something here that is always attracting me afresh. At San Stefano I felt home-sick for Rome and for our studio. You must choose a new subject ... and get to work again. When you're doing nothing, you sit thinking—about social ethics—and that doesn't suit you at all. It makes you so different. And then such petty, conventional ideas. To get married! Why, in Heaven's name, should we, Duco? You know my views on marriage. I have had experience: it is better not."
She had risen and was mechanically looking through some half-finished sketches in a portfolio.
"Your experience," he repeated. "We know each other too well to be afraid of anything."
She took the sketches from the portfolio: they were ideas which had occurred to him and which he had jotted down while he was working at The Banners. She examined them and scattered them abroad:
"Afraid?" she repeated, vaguely. "No," she suddenly resumed, more firmly. "A person never knows himself or another. I don't know you, I don't know myself."
Something deep down within herself was warning her:
"Don't marry, don't give in. It's better not, it's better not."
It was barely a whisper, a shadow of premonition. She had not thought it out; it was unconscious and mysterious as the depths of her soul. For she was not aware of it, she did not think it, she hardly heard it within herself. It flitted through her; it was not a feeling; it only left a thwarting reluctance in her, very plainly. Not until years later would she understand that unwillingness.
"No, Duco, it is better not."
"Think it over, Cornélie,"