"Have I been indiscreet? Perhaps you don't like to talk of your writing. Please forgive me if I've been indiscreet."
"No, no; indeed you haven't been," she answered. "I'm very glad you like my verses. Only—well— I wrote them so long ago. One changes— I was very young...."
"And now," said Amaldi, smiling, "you feel very old, I suppose?"
She smiled in answer.
"I certainly feel older," she said lightly.
Amaldi was thinking how much like a young girl she looked, sitting there in her plain white gown, with her hands clasped about one knee. Having read those impassioned early poems, he marvelled at a spirit that could be at once so fiery and so virginal. He felt sure that there could be no other like her in the world—so deeply was he in love with her already. But this love was quite different from anything that he had ever felt before. It had in it both mysticism and fatality. It was a desire of the soul as well as of the body. He had had "loves" before—this was Love.
And in Sophy's mind was the consciousness of what Olive Arundel had told her, only the day before, about the tragedy of Amaldi's life. It seemed that when he was only twenty-three he had made a mariage de convenance to please his father. He had married his cousin, Clelia Castelli. Two years afterwards she had been unfaithful to him. Amaldi had fought with her lover. Then husband and wife had separated. There is no divorce in Italy.
Sophy was thinking now: "When he was twenty-five—two years younger than I am—he was fighting his wife's lover with a bare sword. He was living out those real, dreadful things when he was a mere boy."
And she could not help glancing curiously at his hand, to which a seal ring of sapphire engraved with his arms gave such a foreign look.... Only thirty-one, and cut off forever by the laws of his country and its religion from family, from children.... Yes—that was tragic. That was real tragedy.
Amaldi said suddenly in his grave voice: