“I loved you--do love you perhaps,” he murmured, almost speaking to himself. “I believe it is so. But your contact causes me horror.”
Every time he repeated the phrase fatal in its truth, insulting in its brutality, he made a material movement of repulsion. Every time, too, this expression made the woman’s face colour in an impetus of anger. Then mastering herself with the singular courage of a strong soul, she answered him with a proud calmness.
“Don’t delude yourself, dear Emilio, that you love me; love is quite another thing. I know that. You do me the honour, like any other man, even now, of desiring me; that is all. That would be very flattering to me if this desire of yours--in fact it would be very simple, very common and quite trivial--were not overcome by the horror with which my desired and repugnant person inspires you. Would you tell me why, if you don’t mind--out of simple curiosity, my friend, nothing else--I cause you horror: now why?”
Gradually Maria’s tone became more disingenuous and frivolous, as if it were a question of a fashionable conversation of very relative interest, yes, although she was hearing words which tortured still more her throbbing soul.
Emilio raised his eyebrows. He knew quite well how much more intelligent, finer, and braver Maria’s character was than his, and how he had almost struck her by reminding her of that night of violence and sorrow, after which they had been divided like two enemies. Now he felt he was in her power, which was loftier for defence, and better adapted to conquer her own and another’s soul. Not attempting to wrestle with her, as with truth itself in all its harshness and vulgarity, he replied in a low voice without looking at her--
“You cause me horror, because I can’t forget.”
“What, please?” she asked, toying with her emerald rings.
“Your betrayal; your flight with Marco Fiore; your three years’ life with him. It is impossible to forget all this, and this recollection scorches me like a red-hot iron.”
“Still,” she said, with some disingenuousness, and the same frivolity in which she had kept up the conversation politely from the beginning, “still you desired my return to your house.”
“You condescended, then, to pardon an unfaithful wife,” she concluded, with a gracious and slight smile, a conventional smile to conclude a worldly discourse.