Page:Undset - Jenny (1921).djvu/156

 knights and maidens, and the leaves in gold and purple she remembered having seen in a book of mass in the San Marco library. The words of the songs looked very strange, hand-printed in elegant monastic Latin types. In some of the larger full-page illustrations the composition was baroque, a direct copy of Roman altar pictures. It was an echo of all he had seen and lived among and loved—an echo of the melody of Gert Gram's youth; not a single note was his own, but this melody of many notes was resounded in a particularly soft, melancholy tone.

"You don't quite like them," he said. "I can see you don't."

"Yes, I like them. There is much that is pretty and delicate about them, but, you know"—she searched for the right expression—"the effect is a little strange on us, who have seen the same subjects treated differently and so perfectly, that we cannot conceive them treated in another way."

He sat opposite her, resting his chin in his hand. By and by he looked up, and she was sad at heart to meet his eyes.

"I seem to remember them as being much better than they are," he said quietly, trying to smile. "I have not opened this portfolio for many a year, as I told you."

"I have never quite understood that you were so attracted by the later renaissance and the baroque," she said, to divert the conversation.

"I am not surprised, Jenny dear, that you don't understand it." He looked into her face with a melancholy smile. "There was a time when I believed in myself as an artist, but not so completely that I did not have a slight doubt sometimes, not of succeeding to express what I wanted, but as to what I really wanted to express. I saw that romantic art had had its day and was on the decline—there was decadence and falsehood all along—and yet in my heart I was devoted to romance, not in painting alone, but in real life. I wanted the Sunday