for working them up. Does he get many of his impressions in London,
should you say?" I proceeded from point to point in this malign
inquiry simply because my hostess, who probably thought me an odious
chattering person, gave me time; for when I paused--I've not
represented my pauses--she simply continued to let her eyes wander
while her long fair fingers played with the medallion on her neck.
When I stopped altogether, however, she was obliged to say something,
and what she said was that she hadn't the least idea where her
husband got his impressions. This made me think her, for a moment,
positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and rather
aristocratically fine as she sat there. But I must either have lost
that view a moment later or been goaded by it to further aggression,
for I remember asking her if our great man were in a good vein of
work and when we might look for the appearance of the book on which
he was engaged. I've every reason now to know that she found me
insufferable.

She gave a strange small laugh as she said: "I'm afraid you think I
know much more about my husband's work than I do. I haven't the
least idea what he's doing," she then added in a slightly different,
that is a more explanatory, tone and as if from a glimpse of the
enormity of her confession. "I don't read what he writes."

She didn't succeed, and wouldn't even had she tried much harder, in
making this seem to me anything less than monstrous. I stared at her
and I think I blushed. "Don't you admire his genius? Don't you
admire 'Beltraffio'?"

She waited, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She didn't
speak, I could see, the first words that rose to her lips; she