On the first meeting of their eyes, Joanna saw that recognition danced in Rasponi’s, and something besides recognition. As her name was made known to him he smiled, showing a line of short, milk-white teeth, and his hand flew uncontrollably to his little black moustache. His face in the daylight was not so much white, Joanna saw, as ivory, with fine, carven features, and remarkable eyelids. There was something of the hardness of ivory in him too; and under the loose grey tweeds he was wearing, she knew his body was like a coiled spring of steel. He was energy itself, but energy pent, not radiant. Joanna had never been so aware of anything: had never imagined anything so living. She was acutely disquieted by his nearness.

In the quadrangle he excused himself for a moment, as he wished to hand in a note at a professor’s house. The two women walked on slowly.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Mildred Lovatt turned twinkling to her companion. “And a genius as well. It seems too much for one man!”

Joanna, startled, had no response ready. Did one call men “beautiful”? Women were beautiful, of course. But men – with their hairy ankles? And he was a genius as well. This meant an artist of some kind no doubt. To conceal her confusion she asked what he did.

Mrs. Lovatt was surprised at the other’s ignorance.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t seen him racing about the roads on that diabolical bicycle of his?” she exclaimed. “I should have thought everybody in Glasgow must know him by now.” And she told how Rasponi had fitted one of the new internal combustion engines to a specially strong bicycle of his own design, and how he was doing research work at the University in connection with a new machine for flying.

“People laugh at him,” she ended “But I’m convinced, myself, that he’ll succeed in time. He’ll either fly or break his neck!”

After Rasponi had come up with them again, they stood talking for a minute by the postern at the very spot where Joanna and he had first looked at each other.

When Mrs. Lovatt had spoken of the small Italian class, he turned to Joanna.

“You already know some Italian perhaps, eh?” His English had the exaggerated precision of the foreigner. It was not broken, but over-perfect.

Joanna shook her head; and smiling he moved his eyes to Mrs. Lovatt.

“Yes Miss Bannerman looks more Italian than I, though so fair. Do you not see it?” he asked her. “Modern Italian, perhaps no. But of the Seicento. Why, there is her portrait in London in your National Gallery, by a painter of the Venetian School – Bernardino Licinio, I think it is. You know it? But surely? The portrait of a young man, it calls itself, but I have always doubted it, and it pleases me to have my doubts confirmed.”