“But if I want it? What if I were to tell you, Dante, that you’re the only man I’ve ever cared for? What if I were to tell you that you’ve always been first in my heart, ever since we first met?”
I looked away from her to the street of water. I had nothing with which to answer. She tried to drag her hands from me, but still I held them.
“Dante,” she whispered, “look at me.” Her voice grew fainter. “I’m not speaking of marriage. Two people can be kind to one another without that.”
“And have I been unkind?”
She turned from my question. “You can never marry her,” she said. “You know that.”
A long silence elapsed, which was broken by voices of the girl and her lover at the neighboring table. Fiesole spoke again. “They’re not married. They never will be married. And yet they can share with one another one little corner of their lives.”
“For me it’s all or nothing,” I said. “If it wasn’t all, I should be forever thinking of the end. That’s how I’m made—it’s my training. If I did anything to you, Fiesole, that wounded you ever so little, I should hate myself. Wherever you were, I should be thinking of you—wanting to leave everything to come to you. I can’t forget. My conscience would give me no rest.”
She drew her hands free. “And yet you’re wounding me now.”
She was always different from other women, doing the unexpected. Instead of sitting melancholy through dinner, she broke into a burst of high spirits. She told me about her father, who had marched with Garibaldi. She rallied me on the awkward little boy I had been when first we met—all arms, and legs, and shyness. She talked of love in a bantering fashion, as insanity of the will. One minute she was the cynical woman of the world—the next the innocent young school-girl. She puzzled and played with me. Then she fell back into the vein of tenderness, recalling the good times we had had, stampeding through the Cotswolds in springtime with the mad wind blowing.
It was nearing midnight when we rose. Going down the little garden, we halted on the steps by the canal. A dozen shadowy figures leapt up with hoarse cries. We beckoned to a poppe; the gondola stole up and we entered.