The woman gnashed her teeth. She had a wild instinct to defend herself, and to hurt him as in a hopeless struggle. A murderous desire flashed across her maddened brain.
--No, you shall not have her!--And the brutality of her tyrant seemed monstrous to her. Under the measured and repeated blows, she felt that she was like a man she had once seen on the dusty road of a mining town, prostrated by repeated blows on his head from a mallet in his enemy's hand. That hideous memory mingled with her mental torture. She sprang up, impelled by the savage force that filled her being. The glass broke in her convulsed hand, cut her, fell in a sparkling shower at her feet.
Stelio startled. The woman's motionless silence had deceived him, but now he looked at her and saw her at last; and once more he saw, as on that night in her room when the logs had crackled on the hearth, the expression of madness on her agitated face. He stammered some words of regret, but impatience boiled under his concern.
"Ah," said La Foscarina, mastering her agony with a bitterness that convulsed her mouth, "how strong I am! Another time have a care that your wounds are not made so slowly, since my resistance is so slight, my friend."
She saw that blood was dripping from her fingers; she wrapped them in her handkerchief. She looked at the sparkling fragments on the grass.
"The cup is broken! You had praised it too highly. Shall we raise a mausoleum for it here?"
She was very bitter, almost mocking, her lips opening slightly to utter a mirthless laugh. Stelio stood silent, chagrined, his heart full of rancor at beholding the destruction of so beautiful an effort as that perfect cup.
"Let us imitate Nero, since we have already imitated Xerxes!"
She felt even more keenly than he the harshness of her sarcasm, the insincerity of her voice, the malignity of the laugh that was like a muscular spasm. But she was unable to conquer her soul at that moment. She felt a bitter, irresistible necessity to scorn, to devastate, to trample under foot, invaded by a sort of perfidious demon. Every vestige of tenderness and benevolence had vanished, every hope, every illusion. The bitter hatred that lurks under the love of ardent natures was dominant. On the man's face she could discern the same shadow that darkened her own.