“Isn’t Marco coming to dinner, mamma?” she asked indifferently, sitting down.
“No, dear. He has been kept at the club by friends.”
“Ah! and is he returning late?” and there was even greater indifference in this second remark.
“Perhaps yes, perhaps no,” added Donna Arduina, looking closely at her daughter-in-law.
Vittoria appeared not to have heeded her mother-in-law’s reply. The dinner proceeded in silence, slowly and peacefully, served by servants who made no noise in crossing the imposing space, where a single candelabra concentrated its light on the table, leaving the rest of the room obscure.
Donna Arduina Fiore had always had a holy terror of installing the electric light in the old palace full of carving, precious pictures, and objects of art. So the old aristocratic methods of illumination prevailed, large oil lamps and huge candelabra with wax candles.
“Where are you going this evening, Vittoria?” said Donna Arduina, interrupting the heavy silence.
“I thought you were going with Beatrice to the last performance of the _Walkyrie_?”
“Beatrice is going there. I said I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, I prefer music; but even that doesn’t make me enthuse.”
“It seems to me, Vittoria, that you enthuse for very few things in the world;” and she tempered the observation with a quiet smile.
“I enthuse over nothing, mamma; really over nothing,” replied Vittoria emphatically.
“But why, daughter? Why? There is good in enthusiasm.”
“I don’t enthuse, mother, by temperament, also by character: I am made so. I have been made very badly,” the young woman declared, with an expression of bitterness.
“Haven’t you tried to change yourself?--to interest yourself deeply in something?--to like something keenly? Have you tried?”
“Still you must have thought and felt that something in the world deserves all our heart?”
“Yes, mother, I have thought and felt it,” the daughter-in-law replied firmly.
“Love?” repeated Donna Arduina, surprised.
“Exactly, my mother. School stories, follies of youth. Old stories!”
With a vague bow she seemed to greet these dreams and follies so old and far away, so dead and scattered. The mother-in-law was silent, wrapped in the ideas and sentiments suggested by her daughter-in-law, which crowded her mind. The dinner finished, Donna Arduina rose to take leave of Vittoria.