Yet somehow the power of expression seemed lacking, and
once or twice he laid down his pen in a fit of abstraction,
wondering why, when he had sought Sylvie as a lover only, he had
been able to write the most passionate love phrases, full of ardour
and poetry, and now, when he was about to make her the offer of his
whole life, his sentences were commonplace and almost cold. And
presently he tore up what he had been writing, and paced the room
impatiently.
"The fact is I shall make a bad husband, and I know it!" he said
candidly to himself, "And Sylvie will make a great mistake if she
accepts me!"
He walked to the window and looked out. His hotel was not in a
fashionable or frequented quarter of Rome, and the opposite view of
the street was anything but enlivening. Dirty, frowsy women,--idle
men, lounging along with the slouching gait which is common to the
'unemployed' Italian,--half-naked children, running hither and
thither in the mud, and screaming like tortured wild animals,--this
kind of shiftless, thriftless humanity, pictured against the
background of ugly modern houses, such as one might find in a London
back slum, made up a cheerless prospect, particularly as the blue
sky was clouded and it was beginning to rain.
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