"It is quite true," he answered, with a smile. "I work with my hands. They do not. There is the difference."
"But you are the greatest artist in the world!" she cried enthusiastically, throwing her arms round his neck, and kissing him again and again. "It is ridiculous. In any other city, in London, in Paris, people would run after you, people would not be able to do enough for you. But it is not you; it is I. They do not like me, Angelo, I know that they do not like me! They want me at their big parties, and they want me to sing for them—but that is all. Not one of them wants me for a friend. I am so lonely, Angelo."
Her eyes filled with tears, and he tried to comfort her.
"What does it matter, my heart?" he asked, soothingly. "We have each other, have we not? I, who adore you, and you, who love me—"
"Love you? I worship you! That is why I wish you to have everything the world holds, everything at your feet."
"But I am quite satisfied," objected Reanda, with unwise truth. "Do not think of me."
She loved him, but she wished to put upon him some of her uncontrollable longing for social success, in order to justify herself. To please her, he should have joined in her complaint. Her tears dried suddenly, and her eyes flashed.
"I will think of you!" she cried. "I have nothing else to think of. You shall have it all, everything—they shall know what a man you are!"
"An artist, my dear, an artist. A little better than some, a little less good than others. What can society do for me?"
She sighed, and the colour deepened a little in her cheeks. But she hid her annoyance, for she loved him with a love at once passionate and intentional, compounded of reality and of a strong inborn desire for emotion, a desire closely connected with her longing for the life of the stage, but now suddenly thrown with full force into the channel of her actual life.