.
    »That was really my ignorance,« said Dorothea, admiring Will's good-humour.
»I must have said so only because I never could see any beauty in the pictures
which my uncle told me all judges thought very fine. And I have gone about with
just the same ignorance in Rome. There are comparatively few paintings that I
can really enjoy. At first when I enter a room where the walls are covered with
frescoes, or with rare pictures, I feel a kind of awe - like a child present at
great ceremonies where there are grand robes and processions; I feel myself in
the presence of some higher life than my own. But when I begin to examine the
pictures one by one, the life goes out of them, or else is something violent and
strange to me. It must be my own dulness. I am seeing so much all at once, and
not understanding half of it. That always makes one feel stupid. It is painful
to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine -
something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.«
    »Oh, there is a great deal in the feeling for art which must be acquired,«
said Will. (It was impossible now to doubt the directness of Dorothea's
confession.) »Art is an old language with a great many artificial affected
styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the
mere sense of knowing. I enjoy the art of all sorts here immensely; but I
suppose if I could pick my enjoyment to pieces I should find it made up of many
different threads. There is something in daubing a little one's self, and having
an idea of the process.«
    »You mean perhaps to be a painter?« said Dorothea, with a new direction of
interest. »You mean to make painting your profession. Mr. Casaubon will like to
hear that you have chosen a profession.«
    »No, oh no,« said Will, with some coldness. »I have quite made up my mind
against it. It is too one-sided a life. I have been seeing a great deal of the
German artists here: I travelled from Frankfort with one of them. Some are fine,
even brilliant fellows - but I should not like to get into their way of looking
at the world entirely from the studio point of view.«
    »That I can understand,« said Dorothea, cordially. »And in Rome it seems as
if there were so