“Vittoria, Vittoria!” he exclaimed in sad reproach, “you as usual are dissimulating and lying, and that makes you suffer and becomes unfair to me. I don’t want to be angry, and you should not suffer.”
“You are mistaken,” she replied coldly, “neither do I suffer nor need you be angry. My confessor has told me that the scope of matrimony is not love but children, that one must ask Heaven for children, and pray very much. I am going to pray.”
“Ah!” he said, suddenly becoming cold, “you are convinced that the scope of matrimony is not love?”
“All the worse,” he exclaimed in a bad temper; “all the worse; and when did you decide to enter the convent for the novena?”
The question was direct and sharp. She hesitated to reply.
“When, Vittoria? Think and tell the truth.”
“This evening,” she replied, with an effort.
“This evening? At the ball?” he insisted, still more sharply.
“This evening at the ball,” she assented, growing very pale.
But pity, sentiment without strength, was already extinguished in Marco’s heart, and there was substituted, as in every heart unjustly suspected, a dull and cruel indignation. He shrugged his shoulders, took his fur coat and hat, and left with a dry, “Good-night, Vittoria.”
She had no strength to reply. With difficulty she closed the door of her big room where she was alone, desperately alone. She dared not weep, for fear that he might return and find her weeping, for fear that, not being very far away, he might hear her weeping.
“Marco, this sudden and unexpected letter will not surprise you. You know already that it is not a love letter, because our souls united and understood themselves too intimately in that past which can never return, and they were too much agreed in feeling the irremediable end of their love for a sentimental misunderstanding ever again to happen between us. If anybody else, a stranger, were to lean over my shoulder, and read the first word written, he would at once have no other thought but this: ‘_See, it was natural, she is writing to her lover, she has never ceased to love him._’ Let it be so. Not a short time has passed since we separated freely and voluntarily, overcome by anguish, but stronger than anguish itself, since the reason for our ardent and free union was at an end. Since it is now May it is nearly two years ago. It is a year since you married Vittoria, when, placing her little hand in yours, she will certainly have pardoned your long infidelity and desertion. Well, my friend, no one about me believes that I have ceased loving you with passion, not even those who know me well, such, for instance, as a faithful friend like Flaminia Colonna, not even a would-be lover like Gianni Provana, to give another instance. No one, and especially my husband, Emilio Guasco; he does not believe, can’t believe, never will believe that I have ceased to love you passionately.