Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that's the way I try
to show them in any professed picture. But you mustn't talk to Mrs.
Ambient about things as they are. She has a mortal dread of things
as they are."

"She's afraid of them for Dolcino," I said: surprised a moment
afterwards at being in a position--thanks to Miss Ambient--to be so
explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark shouldn't have shown
visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it. But he
didn't; he simply declared with a tenderness that touched me: "Ah
nothing shall ever hurt HIM!"

He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home,
and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I'm afraid I
must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of
the artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto,
to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out
of the bag. "She thinks me immoral--that's the long and short of
it," he said as we paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one
of the bars of his gate; while his conscious expressive perceptive
eyes--the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more
than of the usual Englishman--viewing me now evidently as quite a
familiar friend, took part in the declaration. "It's very strange
when one thinks it all over, and there's a grand comicality in it
that I should like to bring out. She's a very nice woman,
extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a
tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her
conception of a novel--she has explained it to me once or twice, and
she doesn't do it badly as exposition--is a thing so false that it
makes me blush. It's a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in