"And do you not think that conjugal fidelity is human, too?"
"Excuse me, I expressly told you that I had once seen a case of it."
"And might one hear the story of this solitary case?"
"An uneventful drama. Nothing is less romantic than virtue. You must be aware of that."
"But does happiness lie in romance?"
"That I cannot say. Possibly, because the reality will never equal the dream. At all events, my faithful pair were the most unhappy mortals I have ever known."
"Do tell me about them."
"Oh, it is very simple. You know that I was brought up in England, near the little town of Dorking. I still have friends there whom I visit occasionally, when I want a change from Italy. Surrey is a picturesque region, where lazy rivers wind their way to the sea between green banks, through wide, fertile valleys at the foot of wooded hills. Everywhere woods and streams, and ravines crested with yews and ancient oaks. Pale, misty skies spread a mother-of-pearl canopy over the wide expanses of thick grass. It is a fox hunting country, and I humbly confess that there are to my mind few pleasures in life equal to the wild intoxication of a mad, aimless gallop, in which, what with hedges and ditches, rivers and precipices, one risks breaking one's neck a hundred times a day. You will from current pictures of it get a fairly good idea of the sport. It is a headlong rush to get—one does not clearly know where. Nothing stops one, nothing furnishes a sufficient reason for turning back. Onward, and still onward! The horses themselves are infected with the general madness. Accidents make no difference. A fallen horse scrambles to his feet again, an unseated rider gets back into the saddle. Some are carried home on stretchers. At night the fallen are counted. In three curt words their friends sympathize with them for having to wait three weeks before going at it again.
"A few years ago, in one of these hunting tumults, I stopped to get my breath after a long gallop on my cob. I was on a wide heath overlooking the valley that ends at the red spires of Dorking. A silvery river, whose name I forget, and a sprinkling of pools set patches of sky in the vast stretch of flowering green. At the horizon a tower is seen, famous in the district, a memorial of the whimsey of a pious personage, who had himself buried there head downward so as to find himself standing upright on the day of the resurrection, when, it seems, the world will be upside down.
"I stood wondering at this ingenuous monument of human simplicity, when I heard behind me the noise of frantic galloping. Before I could move or cry out, a hunter and a maddened horse burst from the wood, within gunshot, and plunged headlong down the steep bank that ended abruptly at the gaping pit of an old quarry. What filled me with unspeakable horror was that the rider was desperately spurring and lashing his horse, who would have been unable anyhow to stop himself in his dizzy descent toward death. In the twinkling of an eye the ground appeared to swallow them both. Nothing was to be seen but heaven and earth smiling at each other with the imperturbable smile of things that never end.