"Then let us go up to the top and sit in the garden."
They did so.
"Don't you feel Rome here?" he asked.
"I feel the same everywhere," she replied.
But he seemed not to hear her:
"It's the atmosphere around you," he continued. "You should try to forget our hotel, to forget Belloni and all our fellow-visitors and yourself. When anybody first arrives here, he has all the usual trouble about the hotel, his rooms, the table-d'hôte, the vaguely likable or dislikable people. You've got over that now. Clear your mind of it. And try to feel only the atmosphere of Rome. It's as if the atmosphere had remained the same, notwithstanding that the centuries lie piled up one above the other. First the middle ages covered the antiquity of the Forum and now it's hidden everywhere by our nineteenth-century craze for travel. There you have Miss Hope's orange lining. But the atmosphere has always remained the same. Unless I imagine it...."
She was silent.
"Perhaps I do," he continued. "But what does that matter to me? Our whole life is imagination; and imagination is a beautiful thing. The beauty of our imagination is the consolation of our lives, to those of us who are not men of action. The past is beauty. The present is not, does not exist. And the future does not interest me."
"Do you ever think about modern problems?" she asked.
"The woman question? Socialism? Peace?"