When she thought of him at all, it was with a contemptuous impatience and wonder, such as she had felt at Daniello Villamagna.
But the sailor was nearer to her, more comprehensible; she would have liked to own the good brig if she could have done so without his owning her.
The Sicilian she laughed at, but in a measure understood; Maurice Sanctis she understood not at all.
Meantime, in a great château of the western provinces, Sanctis himself pursued his work on vast blank wall spaces, which he had promised to make bloom as the rose, with frescoes of the old sweet story of Eros and Psyche.
To every true artist there is no such true delight as fresco; no method which gives so entirely the sense of the power of instantaneous creation. Surely, also, art has never been so great since the panel and the canvas supplanted the wide wall-surface, so eloquent in its barrenness to those who can see with the eye of the mind, as Raffaelle saw when he went through the Stanze that he was called to decorate, dreaming of the School of Athens.
Sanctis would not have been unworthy
