“But my mother was happier.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Who can say? Women are complex. Bianca was all tenderness, a flower of love. She did not pass the walls to seek adventure, but to escape from ambition. When I first met her fresh from La Pietà and heard your grandmother’s plans, I thought, never, never, with such eyes and lips. And I told her the lines from ‘Romeo et Juliette’; you know them?
“‘With love’s light wing did I o’erperch these walls,
For stony limits cannot hold love out.’”
“I am glad she escaped!” flamed back Carlota. “Even my grandmother, who knew in her own heart that love was all to a woman, would have shut her own child away from its beauty and truth—”
“From its agony and devastating influence,” Jacobelli protested placidly. “To the woman of genius this is so, my dear. You cannot discuss it logically because you have never experienced love. Even I have never loved to distraction, always with reason, and I have been most happy. I have buried two beautiful, gifted women who adored me.”
Carlota turned suddenly away, afraid of the flood of words on her lips that she longed to pour out. It would only arouse suspicion against her if she went too far, and already the reaction was setting in, and she felt a great weariness of body and spirit. Were they not right, after all, she thought, as she stood by the window looking riverward? Somewhere she had read that the yearning after ideals was merely the soul’s subconscious memory of another life. Was it then foolish to seek a path to the stars through the world of everyday selfishness and commercialism? Griffeth accepted patronage gladly for the sake of his operetta. She would have had him finish it in the high seclusion of the garret studio and win recognition and fame as his right once it had been submitted to the directors of the Opera. Instead he must seek the favor of persons like Mrs. Nevins, must add the weight of their influence before the magic doors would open to him. And in order to win Mrs. Nevins’s interest and friendship, he must give lessons to her daughter and constantly flatter and compromise with his own critical faculty.
She who loved directness and clarity of vision and the straight, white road ahead, faced suddenly the devious, twisting path that led to success and popularity. Yet there never was a straight road that led to a mountain peak, she thought. Always the winding way, the compromise with risk and danger until one reached the summit of desire. She smiled slowly, and turned to Jacobelli, smoking in long, leisurely puffs until she should have changed her mind.
“I will go to Mr. Ward’s dinner and sing for him,” she said.