Cecilia: A Story of Modern Rome

by F. Marion Crawford

No. That was not at all what she wished to believe, nor could believe, though it was very plausible as a theory. If men lived over again, they did not live the same lives but other lives, worse or better than the first. Nietzsche in this was speaking only of matter which combined and combined again. If it did, each combination might have a new soul of its own. It was conceivable that different souls should be made to suffer and enjoy in precisely the same way. And as for the rest, as for a good deal of Thus spake Zarathushthra, including the Over-Man, and the overcoming of Pity, and the Man who had killed God, she thought it merely fantastic, though much of it was very beautiful and some of it was terrible, and she thought she had understood what Nietzsche meant.

Tired of reading, she lay back in her deep chair and let the open book fall upon her knees. She was in her own room, late in the morning, and the blinds were drawn together to keep out the glare of the wide street, for it was June and the summer was at hand. Outside, the air was all alive with the coming heat, as it is in Italy at the end of spring, and perhaps nowhere else. The sunshine seems to grow in it, like a living thing, that also fills everything with life. It gets into the people, too, and into their voices, and even the grave Romans unbend a little, and laugh more gaily, and their step is more elastic. By-and-by, when the full warmth of summer fills the city, the white streets will be almost deserted in the middle of the day, and men who have to be abroad will drag themselves along where the walls cast a narrow shade, and everything will grow lazy and sleepy and silently hot. But the first good sunshine in June is to the southern people the elixir of life, the magic gold-mist that floats before the coming gods, the breath of the gods themselves breathed into mortals.

Within the girl's room the light was very soft on the pale blue damask hangings, and a gentle air blew now and then from window to window, as if a sweet spirit passed by, bringing a message and taking one away. It stirred Cecilia's golden hair, and fanned her forehead, and somehow, just then, it brought intuitions of beautiful unknown things with it, and inspiration with peace, and clear sight.

Maidenhood is blessed with such moments, beyond all other states. In all times and in all countries it has been half divine, and ever mysteriously linked with divine things. The maid was ever the priestess, the prophetess, and the seer, whose eyes looked beyond the veil and whose ears heard the voices of the immortals; and she of Orleans was not the only maiden, though she was the last, that lifted her fallen country up out of despair and led men to fight and victory who would follow no man-leader where all had failed.

Maidenhood meets evil, and passes by on the other side, not seeing; maidenhood is whole and perfect in itself and sweetly careless of what it need not know; maidenhood dreams of a world that is not, nor was, nor shall be, hitherwards of heaven; maidenhood is angelhood. In its unconsciousness of evil lies its strength, in its ignorance of itself lies its danger.

Cecilia was not trying to call up visions now; she was thinking of her life, and wondering what was to happen, and now and then she was asking herself what she ought to do. Should she marry Guido d'Este, or not? That was the sum of her thoughts and her wonderings and her questions.

She knew she was perfectly free, and that her mother would never try to make her marry against her will. But if she married Guido, would she be acting against her will?

In her own mind she was well aware that he would speak whenever she chose to let him do so. The most maidenly girl of eighteen knows when a man is waiting for an opportunity to ask her to be his wife, whereas most young men who are much in love do not know exactly when they are going to put the question, and are often surprised when it rises to their lips. Cecilia considered that issue a foregone conclusion. The vital matter was to find out her own answer.

She had never known any man, since her step-father died, whom she liked nearly as much as Guido, and she had met more interesting and gifted men before she was really in society than most women ever know in a lifetime. She liked him so much that if he had any faults she could not see them, and she did not believe that he had any which deserved the name. But that was not the question. No woman likes a man because he has no faults; on the contrary, if he has a few, she thinks it will be her mission to eradicate them, and reform him according to her ideal. She believes that it will be easy, and she knows that it will be delightful to succeed, because no other woman has succeeded before. That is one reason why the wildest rakes are often loved by the best of women.

Cecilia liked Guido for his own sake, and felt an intellectual sympathy for him which took the place of what she had sorely missed since her step-father died; she liked him also, because he was always ready to do whatever she wished; and because, with the exception of that one day at the Villa Madama, his moral attitude before her was one of respectful and chivalrous devotion; and also because he and she were fond of the same things, and because he took her seriously and never told her that she was wasting time in trying to understand Kant and Fichte and Hegel, though he possibly thought so; and she liked the little ways he had, and his modesty, though he knew so much, and his simple manner of dressing, and the colour of his hair, and a sort of very faint atmosphere of Russian leather, good cigarettes, and Cologne water that was always about him. There were a great many reasons why she was fond of him. For instance, she had found that he never repeated to any one, not even to Lamberti, a word of any conversation they had together; and if any one at a dinner party or at a picnic attacked any favourite idea or theory of hers, he defended it, using all her arguments as well as his own; and when he knew she could say something clever in the general talk, he always said something else which made it possible for her to bring out her own speech, and he was always apparently just as much pleased with it as if he had not heard it already, when they had been alone. It would be impossible to enumerate all the reasons why she was sure that there was nobody like him.