"Do you remember," he asked, "my begging you, the other day, to do occasionally as I told you?
It seemed to me you tacitly consented." "Very tacitly." "I have never yet really presumed on your consent.

But now I would like you to do this: whenever you catch me in the act of what you call inconsistency, ask me the meaning of some architectural term.

I will know what you mean; a word to the wise!" One morning they spent among the ruins of the Palatine, that sunny desolation of crumbling, over-tangled fragments, half excavated and half identified, known as the Palace of the Caesars.

Nothing in Rome is more interesting, and no locality has such a confusion of picturesque charms.
It is a vast, rambling garden, where you stumble at every step on the disinterred bones of the past; where damp, frescoed corridors, relics, possibly, of Nero's Golden House, serve as gigantic bowers, and where, in the springtime, you may sit on a Latin inscription, in the shade of a flowering almond-tree, and admire the composition of the Campagna.
The day left a deep impression on Rowland's mind, partly owing to its intrinsic sweetness, and partly because his companion, on this occasion, let her Murray lie unopened for an hour, and asked several questions irrelevant to the Consuls and the Caesars.

She had begun by saying that it was coming over her, after all, that Rome was a ponderously sad place.