"I don't see my line before me either."
"Do you know, a restlessness has come over me. Mamma, listen, a restlessness has come over me. I used to dream in the Forum, I was happy and didn't think about my line, my appointed course. Mamma, do you think about your line? Do you, girls?"
His sisters giggled in the dark, sunk in their low chairs, like two pussy-cats. Mamma got up:
"Duco dear, you know I can't follow you. I admire Cornélie for liking your water-colours and understanding what you mean by that line. My line is to go home at once, for it's very late."
"That's the line of the next two seconds. But there is a restlessness about my line that affects it for days and weeks to come. I am not leading the right life. The past is very beautiful and so peaceful, because it once was. But I have lost that peace. The present is very small. But the future!... Oh, if we could only find an aim ... for the future!"
They no longer listened; they went down the dark stairs, groping their way.
"Bread?" he asked himself, wonderingly....
CHAPTER XII
One morning when Cornélie stayed indoors she went through the books that lay scattered about her room. And she found that it was useless for her to read Ovid, in order to study something of Roman manners, some of which had alarmed and shocked her; she found that Dante and Petrarch were too difficult to learn Italian from, whereas she had only to pick up a word or two in order to make herself understood in a shop or by the servants; she found Hare's Walks a too wearisome guide, because every cobble-stone in Rome did not inspire her with the same interest that Hare evidently derived from it. Then she confessed to herself that she could never see Italy and Rome as Duco Van der Staal did. She never saw the light of the skies or the drifting of the clouds as he had seen them in his unfinished water-colour sketches. She had never seen the ruins transfigured in glory as he did in his hours of dreaming on the Palatine or in the Forum. She saw a picture merely with a layman's eye; a Byzantine madonna made no appeal to her. She was very fond of statues; but to fall head over cars in love with a mutilated marble torso, in the spirit in which he loved the Eros, seemed to her sickly ... and yet it seemed to be the right spirit in which to see the Eros. Well, not sickly, she admitted ... but morbid: the word, though she herself smiled at it, expressed her opinion better; not sickly, but morbid. And she looked upon an olive as a tree rather like a willow, whereas Duco had told her that an olive was the most beautiful tree in the world.