in daubing a little one's self, and having an idea of the process."

"You mean perhaps to be a painter?" said Dorothea, with a new
direction of interest. "You mean to make painting your profession?
Mr. Casaubon will like to hear that you have chosen a profession."

"No, oh no," said Will, with some coldness. "I have quite made
up my mind against it. It is too one-sided a life. I have been
seeing a great deal of the German artists here: I travelled from
Frankfort with one of them. Some are fine, even brilliant fellows--
but I should not like to get into their way of looking at the world
entirely from the studio point of view."

"That I can understand," said Dorothea, cordially. "And in Rome
it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted
in the world than pictures. But if you have a genius for painting,
would it not be right to take that as a guide? Perhaps you might
do better things than these--or different, so that there might not
be so many pictures almost all alike in the same place."

There was no mistaking this simplicity, and Will was won by it
into frankness. "A man must have a very rare genius to make changes
of that sort. I am afraid mine would not carry me even to the pitch
of doing well what has been done already, at least not so well
as to make it worth while. And I should never succeed in anything
by dint of drudgery. If things don't come easily to me I never get them."

"I have heard Mr. Casaubon say that he regrets your want of patience,"
said Dorothea, gently. She was rather shocked at this mode of taking
all life as a holiday.