She did not agree with him, either about the olive or about the Eros; and yet she felt that he was right from a certain mysterious standpoint on which there was no room for her, because it was like a mystic eminence amid impassable sensitive spheres which were not hers, even as the eminence was to her an unknown vantage-point of sensitiveness and vision. She did not agree with him and yet she was convinced of his greater rightness, his truer view, his nobler insight, his deeper feeling; and she was certain that her way of seeing Italy, in the disappointment of her disillusion, in the grey light of a growing indifference, was neither noble nor good; and she knew that the beauty of Italy escaped her, whereas to him it was like a tangible and comprehensible vision. And she cleared away Ovid and Petrarch and Hare's guide-book and locked them up in her trunk and took out the novels and pamphlets which had appeared that year about the woman movement in Holland. She took an interest in the problem and thought that it made her more modern than Duco, who suddenly seemed to her to belong to a bygone age, not modern, not modern. She repeated the words with enjoyment and suddenly felt herself stronger. To be modern: that should be her strength. One phrase of Duco's had struck her immensely, that exclamation:
"Oh, if we could only find an aim! Our life has a line, a path, which it must follow...."
To be modern: was that not a line? To find the solution of a modern problem: was that not an aim in life? He was quite right, from his point of view, from which he saw Italy; but was not the whole of Italy a past, a dream ... at least that Italy which Duco saw, a dreamy paradise of nothing but art? It could not be right to stand like that, to see like that a dream like that. The present was here: on the grey horizon muttered an approaching storm; and the latter-day problems flashed like lightning. Was that not what she had to live for? She felt for the woman, she felt for the girl: she herself had been the girl, brought up only as a social ornament, to shine, to be pretty and attractive and then of course to get married; she had shone and she had married; and now she was three-and-twenty, divorced from the husband who at one time had been her only aim and, for her sake, the aim of her parents; now she was alone, astray, desperate and utterly disconsolate: she had nothing to cling to and she suffered. She still loved him, cad and scoundrel though he was; and she had thought that she was doing something very clever, when she went abroad, to Italy, to study art. But she did not understand art, she did not feel Italy. Oh, how clearly she saw it, after those talks with Duco, that she would never understand art, even though she used to sketch a bit, even though she used to have a biscuit-group after Canova in her boudoir, Cupid and Psyche: so nice for a young girl! And with what certainty she now knew that she would never grasp Italy, because she did not think an olive-tree so very beautiful and had never seen the sky of the Campagna as a fluttering phoenix-wing! No, Italy would never be the consolation of her life....
But what then? She had been through much, but she was alive and very young. And once again, at the sight of those pamphlets, at the sight of that novel, the desire arose in her soul: to be modern, to be modern! And to take part in the problem of to-day! To live for the future! To live for her fellow-women, married or unmarried!...
She dared not look deep down into herself, lest she should waver. To live for the future!... It separated her a little more from Duco, that new ideal. Did she mind? Was she in love with him? No, she thought not. She had been in love with her husband and did not want to fall in love at once with the first agreeable young man whom she chanced to meet in Rome....
And she read the pamphlets, about the feminine problem and love. Then she thought of her husband, then of Duco. And wearily she dropped the pamphlets and reflected how sad it all was: people, women, girls. She, a woman, a young woman, an aimless woman: how sad her life was! And Duco: he was happy. And yet he was seeking the line of his life, yet he was looking out for his aim. A new restlessness had entered into him. And she wept a little and anxiously twisted herself on her cushions and clasped her hands and prayed, unconsciously, without knowing to whom she was praying:
"O God, tell me what to do!"
CHAPTER XIII
It was then, after a few days, that Cornélie conceived the idea of leaving the boarding-house and going to live in rooms. The hotel-life disturbed her budding thoughts, like a wind of vanity that was constantly blighting very vague and fragile blossoms; and, despite a torrent of abuse from the marchesa, who reproached her with having engaged to stay the whole winter, she moved into the rooms which she had found with Duco Van der Staal, after much hunting and stair-climbing. They were in the Via dei Serpenti, up any number of stairs: a set of two roomy, but almost entirely unfurnished apartments, containing only the absolute essentials; and, though the view extended far and wide above the house-tops of Rome to the circular ruin of the Colosseum, the rooms were rough and uncomfortable, bare and uninviting. Duco had not approved of them and said that they made him shiver, although they faced the sun; but there was something about the ruggedness of the place that harmonized with Cornélie's new mood.