"Sheer dreaming and impossibility—
Just in four days too! All the seventeen years,
Not once did a suspicion visit me
How very different a lot is mine
From any other woman's in the world.
The reason must be, 'twas by step and step
It got to grow so terrible and strange.
These strange woes stole on tip-toe, as it were . . .
Sat down where I sat, laid them where I lay,
And I was found familiarised with fear."
First there was the amazement of finding herself disowned by Pietro and Violante. Then:
"So with my husband—just such a surprise,
Such a mistake, in that relationship!
Everyone says that husbands love their wives,
Guard them and guide them, give them happiness;
'Tis duty, law, pleasure, religion: well—
You see how much of this comes true with me!"
Next, "there is the friend." . . . People will not ask her about him; they smile and give him nicknames, and call him her lover. "Most surprise of all!" It is always that word: how he loves her, how she loves him . . . yet he is a priest, and she is married. It all seems unreal, like the childish game in which she and her little friend Tisbe would pretend to be the figures on the tapestry:—
"You know the figures never were ourselves.
. . . Thus all my life."
Her life is like a "fairy thing that fades and fades."
"—Even to my babe! I thought when he was born,
Something began for me that would not end,
Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay
For evermore, eternally, quite mine."
And hers he is, but he is gone, and it is all so confused that even he "withdraws into a dream as the rest do." She fancies him grown big,
"Strong, stern, a tall young man who tutors me,
Frowns with the others: 'Poor imprudent child!
Why did you venture out of the safe street?
Why go so far from help to that lone house?
Why open at the whisper and the knock?'"