“I am so glad that you have applied to me at last; and Urania also will approve. I feel I am acting in accordance with her wishes when I send you not two hundred but a thousand lire, with the most humble request that you will accept it and keep it as long as you please. For of course I dare not ask you to take it as a present. Nevertheless I am making so bold as to send you a keepsake. When I read that you were compelled to sell a bracelet, I hated the idea so that, without stopping to think, I ran round to Marchesini’s and, as best I could, picked you out a bracelet which, at your feet, I entreat you to accept. You must not refuse your friend this. Let my bracelet be a secret from Urania as well as from Van der Staal.
“Once more receive my sincere thanks for deigning to apply to me for aid and be assured that I attach the highest value to this mark of favour.
“Your most humble servant,
“Virgilio di F. B.”
Cornélie opened the parcel and found a velvet case containing a bracelet in the Etruscan style: a narrow gold band set with pearls and sapphires.
CHAPTER XXXI
In those hot May days, the big studio facing north was cool while the town outside was scorching. Duco and Cornélie did not go out before nightfall, when it was time to think of dining somewhere. Rome was quiet: Roman society had fled; the tourists had migrated. They saw nobody and their days glided past. He worked diligently; The Banners was finished: the two of them, with their arms around each other’s waists and her head on his shoulder, would sit in front of it, proudly smiling, during the last days before the drawing was to be sent to the International Exhibition in Knightsbridge. Their feeling for each other had never contained such pure harmony, such unity of concord, as now, when his work was done. He felt that he had never worked so nobly, so firmly, so unhesitatingly, never with the same strength, yet never so tenderly; and he was grateful to her for it. He confessed to her that he could never have worked like that if she had not thought with him and felt with him in their long hours of sitting and gazing at the procession, the pageant of women, as it wound out of the night of crumbling pillars to the city of sheer increasing radiance and gleaming palaces of glass. There was rest in his soul, now that he had worked so greatly and nobly. There was pride in them both: pride because of their life, their independence, because of that work of noble and stately art. In their happiness there was much that was arbitrary; they looked down upon people, the multitude, the world; and this was especially true of him. In her there was more of quietude and humility, though outwardly she showed herself as proud as he. Her article on The Social Position of Divorced Women had been published in pamphlet form and made a success. But her own performance did not make her proud as Duco’s art made her proud, proud of him and of their life and their happiness.
While she read in the Dutch papers and magazines the reviews of her pamphlet—often displaying opposition but never any slight and always acknowledging her authority to speak on the question—while she read her pamphlet through again, a doubt arose within her of her own conviction. She felt how difficult it was to fight with a single mind for a cause, as those symbolic women in the drawing marched to the fight. She felt that what she had written was inspired by her own experience, by her own suffering and by these only; she saw that she had generalized her own sense of life and suffering, but without deeper insight into the essence of those things: not from pure conviction, but from anger and resentment; not from reflection, but after melancholy musing upon her own fate; not from her love of her fellow-women, but from a petty hatred of society. And she remembered Duco’s silence at that time, his mute disapproval, his intuitive feeling that the source of her excitement was not pure, but the bitter and turbid spring of her own experience. She now respected his intuition; she now perceived the essential purity of his character; she now felt that he—because of his art—was high, noble, without ulterior motives in his actions, creating beauty for its own sake. But she also felt that she had roused him to it. That was her pride and her happiness; and she loved him more dearly for it. But about herself she was humble. She was conscious of her femininity, of all the complexity of her soul, which prevented her from continuing to fight for the objects of the feminist movement. And she thought again of her education, of her husband, her short but sad married life ... and she thought of the prince. She felt herself so complex and she would gladly have been homogeneous. She swayed between contradiction and contradiction and she confessed to herself that she did not know herself. It gave a tinge of melancholy to her days of happiness.
The prince ... was not her pride only apparent that she had asked him not to tell Urania that she was living with Duco, because she would tell her so herself? In reality, she feared Urania’s opinion.... She was troubled by the dishonesty of the life: she called the intersections of the line with the lines of other small people the petty life. Why, so soon as she crossed one of these intersections, did she feel, as though by instinct, that honesty was not always wise? What became of her pride and her dignity—not apparently, but actually—from the moment that she feared Urania’s criticism, from the moment that she feared lest this criticism might be unfavourable to her in one respect or another? And why did she not speak of Virgilio’s bracelet to Duco? She did not speak of the thousand lire because she knew that money matters depressed him and that he did not want to borrow from the prince, because, if he knew about it, he would not be able to work free from care; and her concealment had been for a noble object. But why did she not speak of Gilio’s bracelet?...
She did not know. Once or twice she had tried to say, just naturally and casually:
“Look, I’ve had this from the prince, because I sold that one bracelet.”