It was as if they had strayed across the limits of Arcadia; and come under a civil polity where young men might avow their passion with as little restraint as a bird pipes its note to a similar purpose.
"Why should you love me, foolish boy ?" said she.

"We have no points of sympathy at all.

There are not two creatures more unlike, in this wide world, than you and I!" "You are yourself, and I am Donatello," replied he.

"Therefore I love you! There needs no other reason." Certainly, there was no better or more explicable reason.

It might have been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more readily attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own, than to one already turbid with grief or wrong, as Miriam's seemed to be.