across Italy to the westward route--and now she could fill up her
gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she already knew in
colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series
delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of
Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.

But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural
effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a
thousand memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping
a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered
familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can
hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace
comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless
satisfaction these things gave her.

Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated
person with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was
cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of
these things. She was passive, and I am active. She did not simply
and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for
it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and
lectures and all the organisation of beautiful things than she did
in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to
it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points
me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life, but I take my beauty
as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal. . . .

And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more
beautiful than any picture. . . .