"I no longer see-anything," she confessed. "Rome has quite bewildered me. I can't distinguish a colour, an outline. I don't recognize people. They all seem to whirl round me. Sometimes I feel a need to sit alone for hours in my bird-cage upstairs, to recollect myself. This morning, in the Vatican, I don't know: I remember nothing. It is all grey and fuzzy around me. Then the people in the boarding-house: the same faces every day. I see them and yet I don't see them. I see … I see Madame von Rothkirch and her daughter, I see the fair Urania … and Rudyard … and the little Englishwoman, Miss Taylor, who is always so tired with sight-seeing and who thinks everything most exquisite. But my memory is so bad that, when I am alone, I have to think to myself: Mrs. von Rothkirch is tall and stately, with the smile of the German Empress—she is rather like her—talking fast and yet with indifference, as though the words just fell indifferently from her lips. … "
"You're a good observer," said Van der Staal.
"Oh, don't say that!" said Cornélie, almost vexed. "I see nothing and I can't remember. I receive no impressions. Everything around me is colourless. I really don't know why I have come abroad. … When I'm alone, I think of the people I meet. I know Madame von Rothkirch now and I know Else. Such a round merry face, with arched eyebrows, and always a joke or a witticism: I find it tiring sometimes, she makes me laugh so. Still, they are very nice. And the fair Urania. She tells me everything. She is as communicative … as I am at this moment. And Rudyard: I see him before me too."
"Rudyard!" smiled mevrouw and the girls.
"What is he?" Cornélie asked, inquisitively. "He is so civil, he ordered my wine for me, he can always get one all sorts of cards."
"Don't you know what Rudyard is?" asked Mrs. Van der Staal.
"No; and Mrs. von Rothkirch doesn't know either."
"Then you had better be careful," laughed the girls.
"Are you a Catholic?" asked mevrouw.
"No."
"Nor the fair Urania either? Nor Mrs. von Rothkirch?"
"No."
"Well, that is why la Belloni put Rudyard at your table. Rudyard is a Jesuit. Every pension in Rome has a Jesuit who lives there free of charge, if the proprietor is a good friend of the Church, and who tries to win souls by making himself especially agreeable."
Cornélie refused to believe it.
"You can take my word for it," mevrouw continued, "that in a pension like this, a first-class pension, a pension with a reputation, a great deal of intrigue goes on."
"La Belloni?" Cornélie enquired.
"Our marchesa is a thorough-paced intrigante. Last winter, three English sisters were converted here."
"By Rudyard?"
"No, by another priest. Rudyard is here for the first time this winter."
"Rudyard walked quite a long way with me in the street this morning," said young Van der Staal. "I let him talk, I heard all he had to say."
Cornélie fell back in her chair:
"I am tired of people," she said, with the strange sincerity which was hers. "I should like to sleep for a month, without seeing anybody."
And, after a short pause, she got up, said good-night and went to bed, while everything swam before her eyes.
CHAPTER VI
She remained indoors for a day or two and had her meals served in her room. One morning, however, she was going for a stroll in the Villa Borghese, when she met young Van der Staal, on his bicycle.
"Don't you ride?" he asked, jumping off.
"No."
"Why not?"
"It is an exercise which doesn't suit my style," Cornélie replied, vexed at meeting any one who disturbed the solitude of her stroll.
"May I walk with you?"
"Certainly."
He gave his machine into the charge of the porter at the gate and walked on with her, quite naturally, without saying very much:
"It's beautiful here," he remarked.
His words seemed to convey a simple meaning. She looked at him, for the first time, attentively:
"You're an archæologist?" she asked.
"No," he said, deprecatingly.
"What are you, then?"
"Nothing. Mamma says that, just to excuse me. I'm nothing and a very useless member of society at that. And I'm not even well off."
"But you are studying, aren't you?"
"No. I do a little casual reading. My sisters call it studying."
"Do you like going about, as your sisters do?"
"No, I hate it. I never go with them."
"Don't you like meeting and studying people?"
"No. I like pictures, statues and trees."
"A poet?"
"No. Nothing. I am nothing, really."
She looked at him, with increased attention. He was walking very simply by her side, a tall, thin fellow of perhaps twenty-six, more of a boy than a man in face and figure, but endowed with a certain assurance and restfulness that made him seem older than his years. He was pale; he had dark, cool, almost reproachful eyes; and his long, lean figure, in his badly-kept cycling-suit, betrayed a slight indifference, as though he did not care what his arms and legs looked like.
He said nothing but walked on pleasantly, unembarrassed, without finding it necessary to talk. Cornélie, however, grew fidgety and sought for words:
"It is beautiful here," she stammered.
"Oh, it's very beautiful!" he replied, calmly, without seeing that she was constrained. "So green, so spacious, so peaceful: those long avenues, those vistas of avenues, like an antique arch, over yonder; and, far away in the distance, look, St. Peter's, always St. Peter's. It's a pity about those queer things lower down: that restaurant, that milk-tent. People spoil everything nowadays. … Let us sit down here: it is so lovely here."
They sat down on a bench.
"It is such a joy when a thing is beautiful," he continued. "People are never beautiful. Things are beautiful: statues and paintings. And then trees and clouds!"
"Do you paint?"
"Sometimes," he confessed, grudgingly. "A little. But really everything has been painted already; and I can't say that I paint."
"Perhaps you write too?"
"There has been even more written than painted, much more. Perhaps everything has not yet been painted, but everything has certainly been written. Every new book that is not of absolute scientific importance is superfluous. All the poetry has been written and every novel too."
"Do you read much?"
"Hardly at all. I sometimes dip into an old author."
"But what do you do then?" she asked, suddenly, querulously.
"Nothing," he answered, calmly, with a glance of humility. "I do nothing, I exist."
"Do you think that a good mode of life?"
"No."
"Then why don't you adopt another?"
"As I might buy a new coat or a new bicycle?"
"You're