"Lorenza, sweetest, you are my well-beloved wife."
"Yet you pass by the chaste and solitary flower and scorn the perfume? I am sure that I am nothing to you."
"On the contrary, you are everything—my Lorenza. For it is you who give me strength, power and genius—without you I should be nothing. Cease, then, to love me with this insensate fever which wrecks the nights of your people, and love me as I love you. Thus I am happy."
"You call that happiness?" scornfully said the Italian.
"Yes, for to be great is happiness."
She heaved a long sigh.
"Oh, if you only knew the gladness in being able to read the hearts of man and manipulate them with the strings of their own dominant passions."
"Yes, I know that in this I serve your purpose."
"It is not all. Your eyes read the sealed book of the future. You, sweet dove, pure and guideless, you have taught me what I could not ascertain in twenty years' application. You enlighten my steps, before which my enemies multiply traps and snares; on my mind depend my life, fortune and liberty—you dilate it like the lynx's eye which sees in the dark. As your lovely orbs close on this world, they open in superhuman clarity. They watch for me. It is you who make me rich, free and powerful."