To Juley he was attentive and affectionate in a bright filial way, which gave her great pleasure. He enlivened her, and she felt at home with him as she did always with foreigners. She loved airing her rusty Italian while he praised her intonation. His enthusiasm, his clear unworldliness warmed her heart. They had long and on her side impassioned talks about the persecution of the Jews in Russia. She was delighted with his interest in politics. She was still more delighted that he enjoyed her society. Here was a young, clever man who did not fight shy of her.

At first Joanna wondered that her mother made so light of Mario’s frank irreligion. Was it possible that one to whom faith was everything, could overlook its absence in a son-in-law? Yet the explanation was simple. Rasponi came of a strict Catholic family (one of his uncles was a Cardinal), and the fact that he had broken with the Church of Rome was by Juley accounted to him for righteousness.

Then there were the rides he gave her. He had rigged up a wicker trailer, and attached it to that amazing machine of his which Juley would insist on calling the velocipede. She enjoyed every moment of the velocipede from its arrival at the front door. She liked to feel the neighbours at their windows while Mario was tucking her in. She smiled happily at the little crowd of children who gathered round; and when he rang his bell, and took her slowly down the long slope to Woodlands Road and back again, she was in raptures. Each time they went out thus her wonder was new. She could not grow accustomed to it.

But she would not hear about his flying.

“If we had been meant to fly,” she said, looking sorrowfully at him, “God would have given us wings.” And she refused to listen to his ready arguments. So he let her be.

To Joanna he spoke little of his work, but much of woman’s place in the scheme of things. He laughed to scorn her ideas of companionship between man and woman.

“Do you think I would choose you,” he exclaimed one day “if I wished for a companion? You, a little, ignorant girl from Glasgow, with no experience of life, no knowledge of what most interests me – machinery: no intellect to speak of? Why, you do not even know my language! Some day – say twenty years hence – when you have learned all I have to teach you, you may be a fit companion for a man, and then only perhaps. But by then you will have lost what now sets my heart on fire. Companion! My poor baby, you do not know what you are talking of, and what it is you want, you still less know. Would you be here with me now, dropping your eyes before the desire in mine, if we were companions? I think not.”