as easily as primitive people imagined the humours of the gods in fair weather: what is she to believe in, if not in this vision woven from within?
And Tito was really very far from feeling impatient. He delighted in sitting there with the sense that Romola’s attention was fixed on him, and that he could occasionally look at her.
He was pleased that Bardo should take an interest in him; and he did not dwell with enough seriousness on the prospect of the work in which he was to be aided, to feel moved by it to anything else than that easy, good-humoured acquiescence which was natural to him.
“I shall be proud and happy,” he said, in answer to Bardo’s last words, “if my services can be held a meet offering to the matured scholarship of Messere. But doubtless,”—here he looked towards Romola—“the lovely damigella , your daughter, makes all other aid superfluous; for I have learned from Nello that she has been nourished on the highest studies from her earliest years.”