He was leaving the room when Paoletti called him back in a conciliatory tone.
“You must be fully aware,” he said, “that the presence of no other confessor will have the same effect as mine. If you will pledge yourself not to interfere in any particular, I will go with you with pleasure, to comfort and help the hapless sufferer. Nay, more,” he added with a burst of feeling, “I may tell you frankly that I earnestly wish to go. She is so saintly, so admirable! I not only admire and respect her—I look up to her as a superior being.”
“And what will you tell her?”
“What it is my duty to tell her,” replied the Italian fixing a pair of eyes on Leon’s face, which might have been a hundred pairs. “It strikes me as strange that a man who declares that he had thrown off every matrimonial tie, should trouble himself so much about his wife’s conscience.”
“I am not anxious about her conscience, but about her health,” said Leon who was getting very weary.
“You tell me you do not love her, nor she you?”
“Yes.”
“But it is her person—her mortal part, that a man may claim, not her exquisite conscience.”
“Quite true,” said Leon, draining the cup. “I leave her conscience to you, who have made it. I have no wish to put in a claim for the monstrosity.”