Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/417

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opportunity presenting itself the next day, he failed not, as you may imagine, to ask Mary Garland what she thought of Christina. It was a Saturday afternoon, the time at which the beautiful marbles of the Villa Borghese are thrown open to the public. Mary had told him that Roderick had promised to take her to see them with his mother, and he joined the party in the splendid Casino. The warm weather had left so few strangers in Rome that they had the place to almost themselves. Mrs. Hudson had confessed to an invincible fear of treading even with the help of her son's arm the polished marble floors, and was sitting patiently on a stool, with folded hands, looking shyly here and there at the undraped paganism around her. Roderick had sauntered off alone with an irritated brow which seemed to betray the conflict between the instinct of observation and the perplexities of circumstance. His cousin was astray in another direction, and if Rowland caught her with her eyes on the catalogue he explained it as a sign of her system of concealing anxieties. He joined her, and she presently dropped for him on a divan and rather wearily closed her eternal red handbook. Then he asked her abruptly how Christina had pleased her. She started the least bit at the question, and he felt she had been thinking of Christina. "I don't like her!" she dryly said. 383