He reflected that she was probably the only person he knew who didn’t attach importance to his work. And it was important; something would be changed in the field, however imperceptibly, when his book came out. She, who knew nothing, nothing at all, and was always exalting her miserable intuitions into the sphere of knowledge—how dare she speak of his interest in his work as though it were something pedestrian, discreditable? She had no feeling for the elements, the composition of things. Once, for instance, in Rome, they had seen an ancient inscription on a wall, and he had begun to translate it aloud when she, brushing aside the syntax, rendered the sense of it in half a dozen words and turned away, having temporarily deprived him of his reason for living.

“Perhaps it’s true that I care most about my work,” he said. “But then I do care—about other things. In any case, I can’t be what I’m not.”

They were walking now on a path of small stones.

She persisted, relentlessly: “You gave a different impression when we first knew each other.”

He halted, opening his hands helplessly. “Well—that was human.”

This, unexpectedly, seemed to be an acceptable answer, and they turned off the path into a vast shell of red Roman brick, and entered an inner courtyard. Water was seeping over the ruined paving and around the plinths of the broken columns that unevenly supported the sky. Releasing his arm, in which her own had remained, she made her way across the drier slabs of stone to a pillar and seated herself in its shadow.

He followed her, reopening his guidebook. “This must be Hadrian’s retreat—the Maritime Theater,” he said. He sat down on the base of the column, and they held the book between them.

We love to indulge in the generally entertained tradition, and fancy the Emperor Hadrian in his moments of spleen and misanthropy slipping off by himself and recover his spirits from the grievous weight of the care of the empire.…