"The last night of September, the night of the Allegory. There was a great light on the water. You were in an exalted mood, and talked and talked. What things you said! You had come from solitude, and your overcharged soul broke forth. You poured a sparkling wave of poetry over your companion. A bark passed, laden with pomegranates. I called myself Perdita. Do you remember?"
As she walked she felt the extreme lightness of her step and felt that something in her was vanishing, as if her body were on the point of being changed to an empty chrysalis.
"My name was still Perdita. Stelio, do you recall another sonnet of Gaspara's beginning:
_Io vorrei pur che Amor dicesse come Debbo seguirlo...._
"I did not know you were so familiar with the unhappy Anasilla, my dear."
"Ah, I will tell you. I was hardly fourteen years old when I played in an old romantic tragedy called _Gaspara Stampa_. I played the leading part. It was at Dolo, where we passed the other day on our way to Strà. We played in a small rustic theater--a kind of tent. It was the year before my mother died. I remember it very well. I can remember the sound of my own voice, which was weak then, when I forced it in the tirades because some one in the wings kept whispering to me to speak louder, louder!... Well, Gaspara was despairing; she wept and raved for her cruel Count. There were many things about it all that my small, profaned soul did not know or understand, and I know not what instinct and comprehension of sorrow led me to find the accent and the cries that could stir the miserable crowd from which we expected to gain our daily bread. Ten hungry persons used me as a breadwinner; brutal necessity cut and tore away from me all the dream-flowers born of my trembling precocity. Oh, it was a time of weeping and suffocation, of terror, of unthinking weariness, of mute horror. Those that martyrized me knew not what they were doing, poor creatures, made stupid by poverty and work. God pardon them and give them peace! Only my mother--she, too, who 'for having loved too well and been too little loved, unhappy lived and died'--only my mother had pity on my pain, and knew how to take me in her arms, how to calm my horrible trembling, to weep when I wept, to console me. My blessed mother!"