"We shall never go back to the old way, shall we?" he asked, before she spoke again.
"I hope not!" she answered. "It was so absurd, sometimes. Do you remember at Bianca's house—"
"The night before you left? When I forgot my stick?"
"Yes; but before that. You seemed to think that there was to be no more writing because I was coming here."
"Of course—that is, I supposed that it might make a difference—"
"And then you asked me. You should have seen your face! I can remember it now. It changed all at once."
"It is no wonder. You changed the whole future with one word. You seemed really to want my letters much more than I had imagined that you did."
As by the quick lifting of a dividing veil, all the awkward little incidents and memories of constraint had suddenly become parts of the much larger and more pleasant recollection of their semi-secret intimacy, and in blending with the broader picture the little ones somehow ceased to have anything disagreeable in them, and instead, there was a touch of humour and a suggestion of laughter each time that they compared what they had said and done with what they had written and felt. It was no wonder that the fascination grew on Gianluca with every dancing beat of the happy man's pulse.
They talked on, and in the way she talked Veronica showed that while her character had grown in three-quarters of a year from girlhood to womanhood, and from womanhood to the half-imperial masculinity of a dictatress, her heart was younger than the youngest, was as unsuspicious of itself as a child's, ready to give itself in an innocent generosity which could not conceive that giving might mean being taken, or be as like it as to deceive such a willing, love-sick man as poor Gianluca. She did not say that she loved him, she did not love him, she did not wish him to think that she could love him. Why should he think that she did? Surely, that he loved her, or thought so, could make no difference.
She was so very young, under her armour of despotism, that she might almost have loved him, as she had all but loved Bosio, had there been anything to love. But there was not. Gianluca was a shadow, an unmaterial being, a thought—anything ethereal, but not a man.