He had the advantage of Sophy in this sudden meeting, because he had been prepared for it. However, "preparation" in such a case is something as if a man imprisoned for years in a dark dungeon should "prepare" to see the sunlight. As much as he might school himself, he would be sure to quake to his inmost core when once again it flooded him.
Amaldi had tried hard to forget. If he had not forgotten he had at least succeeded in dulling the edge of his feeling for her. But it was by time and work that he had chiefly commanded his love.
He flung himself into all sorts of agricultural and civic reforms and enterprises. Political life, as an end in itself, did not appeal to him, but he thought with Cavour in regard to the "need which every worthy man feels of making himself useful to the society of which he is a part."
Then had come the news of Sophy's marriage to Loring. Amaldi had had another bitter recrudescence of feeling over that. He was filled with a contemptuous anger against himself for what seemed to him a poor-spirited fidelity. He was nothing, had never been anything to this woman who spread devastation through his life. He had always despised the love that starves on in faithful submission. He would on every occasion have altered where he alteration found, and bent with the remover to remove—only he discovered that it was not in his power to do so. This emotion which had seized him without his volition or consent, proved stronger than his will. Even though he succeeded in curbing it, though it lay in chains, as it were, in the profundity of his being—yet it stirred and threatened at the idea of any other love. It was like a jealous, ill-governed prisoner who will not share his cell.
This one, supreme flame had burned out in Amaldi all capacity for loving any other woman.
As the years passed, however, a calmer temper rose in him. Reflecting on those early days of his love for Sophy, he realised that he had demanded much while offering little—that he had been unreasonable in expecting her to love him under the circumstances. Why, indeed, he asked himself one day, four years after he had parted from her so stormily—why truly should she have loved him? His whole effort at that time had been to repress himself. He had never been truly himself when with her, so much of his will had been absorbed in trying to restrain his passion. He had been silent, reserved, conventional. Yet he had expected her to return a feeling, whose depth and intensity she could not possibly have realised. Now for the second time she was the wife of another man....
No reasoning, no philosophy, no lapse of time could save Amaldi from crisping in the furnace of this thought.
But when, two years afterwards, his agricultural interests made a journey to America seem necessary, he faced the probability of meeting her again with tolerable coolness. He was nearing forty and he considered life a discipline to be endured with hardihood. His character had deepened and strengthened.
The Marchesa, in daily contact with him, found a dear companion, though his habit of long silences seemed to increase with growing years. To his inmost self she never attained. She did not know whether any chord of his former passion for Sophy still vibrated. He never alluded to her.
The situation in regard to his wife was just the same. When the Marchesa looked at her son's fine, sensitive dark face, grown stronger for controlled pain, and realised that in all likelihood no compensation would ever come to him, she felt that incomparable bitterness with which we watch the suffering of one for whom we would gladly die.