"I loved one of them tenderly; it had lost its arms, which once balanced a basket of fruit on its head. But the hands still remained attached to the basket, and the sight of them always aroused my pity. This statue stood on its pedestal in a flax-field; a little canal of stagnant water was near it, in which the reflected sky repeated the tender blue of the flowers. And always, since that time, in my most glowing moments on the stage, visions of some landscape rise in my memory, particularly when by the mere force of silence I succeed in producing a thrill in the listening throng."
Her cheeks had flushed a little, and as the sun wrapped her in a radiant garment, drawing sparkles from her furs and from the crystal cup, her animation seemed like an increase of light.
"What a spring that was! In one of my wandering journeys I saw a great river for the first time. It appeared to me suddenly, swollen, and flowing rapidly between two wild banks. I felt then how much of divinity there is in a great stream running through the earth. It was the Adige, flowing down from Verona, from the city of Juliet."
An ambiguous emotion filled her heart while she recalled the poverty and poetry of her youth. She was impelled to continue, though she did not know how she had arrived at these confidences, when she had intended to speak to her friend of another young life, not belonging to the past, but to the present. By what surprise of love had she been turned from an effort of her will, from her firm decision to face the painful truth, from the concentration of her slumbering energy to linger in the memory of the past, and to cover with the image of her own lost virgin self that other image which was so different?
"We reached Verona one evening in May. I was devoured by anxiety. I clasped close to my heart the book in which I had copied the lines of Juliet, and continually repeated to myself the words of my first entrance: 'How now? Who calls? I am here. What is your will?' My imagination was excited by a strange coincidence: on that very day I was fourteen years old—the age of Juliet. The Nurse's gossip sounded in my ears; and, little by little, my own destiny seemed mingled with that of the Veronese. At the corner of every street I thought I could see a throng approaching me, accompanying a coffin covered with white roses. When I saw the Arche degli Scaligeri behind its iron bars, I cried to my mother, 'Here is Juliet's tomb!' And I burst into sobs, and had a desperate desire to love and to die. 'O thou too early seen unknown, and known too late!'"
Her voice, repeating the immortal words, penetrated the heart of her lover like a heart-rending melody. She paused a moment, then repeated:
"Too late!"
They were the ominous words spoken by her lover, which she herself had repeated in the garden, when both were on the brink of being swept away on the flood of their passion: "It is late; too late!" The woman that was no longer young now faced the former image of herself, in her maidenhood, throbbing in the form of Juliet before her first dream of love. Having reached the limit of experience, had she not at the same time preserved the dream intact—but to what purpose? If to-day she looked at the image of her far-distant youth, it was only to trample upon it in leading her beloved to the other woman, to her who lived and waited.
With her smile of inimitable sadness, she said: