"Besides, dear Sabini," resumed Vittorio, with a degree of greater sarcasm, "I am less poor than I was formerly. Then I spent too much to find the heiress with the great fortune, to live grandly, and to travel. When I announced that I was marrying Livia, Uncle Costrucci, an old clerical, was moved, and let us have, for our natural lifetime, a beautiful suite of apartments in old Rome, in via Botheghe Oscure. Mamma has come to live with us, and her cousin, Farnese, made her a present of a carriage. Ours is a marriage which has been made by public subscription! We have our house and our carriage. Livia is so charming in her discreet _toilettes_, discreet in every fashion. I haven't to strive as I thought, I have not even been forced to work as I supposed. There is nothing of the heroic in me--a mediocre destiny, and a mediocre life!"
"Ah, Vittorio, you still suffer," said Lucio, in a deeply moved voice.
"In my _amour-propre_, I confess. Think, Lucio, how I have been treated--surrounded, knocked on the head like a lamb under calumnies, defamations and vituperations, in every land where international society gathers--and how I have been unable to cuff a single one of my adversaries. Think how rivers of ink have been poured out in the papers of two worlds to defame me, and how I have been unable to spit in the face of a single one of those journalists; think how I have been unable to defend myself or offer a fight, solely because I loved Mabel and Mabel loved me. And afterwards, Lucio, what an incurable offence to my _amour-propre_, this breaking off the marriage, which sanctions the calumnies, this breaking off ... and how everyone laughed at me afterwards, and if they do not laugh at Livia and me now it is because we are a quiet, modest _ménage_ that lives in the shade--we are an insignificant couple now."
"Another man, Vittorio, would never have consented to breaking off the marriage."
"Another! I consented because I loved Mabel; I loved her like a child, like a Don Quixote, with such fire and devotion as to become a hero--and I so mediocre! Through love I renounced my every good, but of my own free will. Ah, if I had not loved her! If I had been a cold and interested man, even under the impulse of an amorous caprice; if I had kept my clearness of mind, even in flirting to extremes, how different everything would have been. If I had not loved her I could have fled with her ten times from the Engadine, and she would have been compromised and the marriage would have been inevitable. If I had not loved her I would not so ingenuously have allowed her to set out alone for America; if I had not loved her I would have provoked a duel at every defamation and reduced my defamers to silence. At the first injurious article of the American newspapers I would have gone over there to make them show cause in the law courts; if I had not loved her I should have been able to force her to keep her engagements, and I should have obtained her by force, her and her fortune; but I should have obtained her. I loved her, and I destroyed my happiness and my life."