"What a pleasant evening you gave us yesterday! A couple of hours' cheerful talk like that, at a well-chosen dinner, does me good. However happy I may be, our present position of financial anxiety sometimes depresses me, though I keep up my spirits for Duco's sake. Money worries interfere with his work and impair his energy. So I discuss them with him as little as I can; and I particularly beg you not to let him into our little secret.
"Once more, my best and most sincere thanks.
When she left the house that morning, she went straight to the Palazzo Ruspoli:
The porter bowed respectively and confidentially:
"An hour ago, signora. His excellency left a letter and a parcel for me to give you if you should call. Permit me to fetch them."
He went away and soon returned; he handed Cornélie the parcel and the letter.
She walked down a side-street turning out of the Corso, opened the envelope and found a few bank-*notes and this letter:
"I am so glad that you have applied to me at last; and Urania also will approve. I feel I am acting in accordance with her wishes when I send you not two hundred but a thousand lire, with the most humble request that you will accept it and keep it as long as you please. For of course I dare not ask you to take it as a present. Nevertheless I am making so bold as to send you a keepsake. When I read that you were compelled to sell a bracelet, I hated the idea so that, without stopping to think, I ran round to Marchesini's and, as best I could, picked you out a bracelet which, at your feet, I entreat you to accept. You must not refuse your friend this. Let my bracelet be a secret from Urania as well as from Van der Staal.
"Once more receive my sincere thanks for deigning to apply to me for aid and be assured that I attach the highest value to this mark of favour.
"Your most humble servant, "Virgilio di F. B."
Cornélie opened the parcel and found a velvet case containing a bracelet in the Etruscan style: a narrow gold band set with pearls and sapphires.
In those hot May days, the big studio facing north was cool while the town outside was scorching. Duco and Cornélie did not go out before nightfall, when it was time to think of dining somewhere. Rome was quiet: Roman society had fled; the tourists had migrated. They saw nobody and their days glided past. He worked diligently; The Banners was finished: the two of them, with their arms around each other's waists and her head on his shoulder, would sit in front of it, proudly smiling, during the last days before the drawing was to be sent to the International Exhibition in Knightsbridge. Their feeling for each other had never contained such pure harmony, such unity of concord, as now, when his work was done. He felt that he had never worked so nobly, so firmly, so unhesitatingly, never with the same strength, yet never so tenderly; and he was grateful to her for it. He confessed to her that he could never have worked like that if she had not thought with him and felt with him in their long hours of sitting and gazing at the procession, the pageant of women, as it wound out of the night of crumbling pillars to the city of sheer increasing radiance and gleaming palaces of glass. There was rest in his soul, now that he had worked so greatly and nobly. There was pride in them both: pride because of their life, their independence, because of that work of noble and stately art. In their happiness there was much that was arbitrary; they looked down upon people, the multitude, the world; and this was especially true of him. In her there was more of quietude and humility, though outwardly she showed herself as proud as he. Her article on The Social Position of Divorced Women had been published in pamphlet form and made a success. But her own performance did not make her proud as Duco's art made her proud, proud of him and of their life and their happiness.