She did not know whether to resent or welcome his clairvoyance, his
assumption of intimacy, his air of appropriation. But her curiosity was
tingling.

"And you?" she asked. "Your name is Rolfe, isn't it?"

He assented. "And yours?"

She told him.

"You have been in America long--your family?"

"Very long," she said. "But you speak Italian, and Rolfe isn't an Italian
name."

"My father was an Englishman, an artist, who lived in Italy--my mother a
peasant woman from Lombardy, such as these who come to work in the mills.
When she was young she was beautiful--like a Madonna by an old master."

"An old master?"

"The old masters are the great painters who lived in Italy four hundred
years ago. I was named after one of them--the greatest. I am called
Leonard. He was Leonardo da Vinci."

The name, as Rolfe pronounced it, stirred her. And art, painting! It was
a realm unknown to her, and yet the very suggestion of it evoked
yearnings. And she recalled a picture in the window of Hartmann's
book-store, a coloured print before which she used to stop on her way to
and from the office, the copy of a landscape by a California artist. The