“Do you really mean,” he said, with a tinge of hauteur in his accents, “that you will not visit her—that you refuse her request?”
I smiled. “I really mean, my dear Signor Ferrari, that, being always accustomed to have my own way, I can make no exception in favor of ladies, however fascinating they may be. I have business in Naples—it claims my first and best attention. When it is transacted I may possibly try a few frivolities for a change—at present I am unfit for the society of the fair sex—an old battered traveler as you see, brusque, and unaccustomed to polite lying. But I promise you I will practice suave manners and a court bow for the countess when I can spare time to call upon her. In the meanwhile I trust to you to make her a suitable and graceful apology for my non-appearance.”
Ferrari’s puzzled and vexed expression gave way to a smile—finally he laughed aloud. “Upon my word!” he exclaimed, gayly, “you are really a remarkable man, conte! You are extremely cynical! I am almost inclined to believe that you positively hate women.”
“Oh, by no means! Nothing so strong as hatred,” I said, coolly, as I peeled and divided a fine peach as a finish to my morning’s meal. “Hatred is a strong passion—to hate well one must first have loved. No, no—I do not find women worth hating—I am simply indifferent to them. They seem to me merely one of the burdens imposed on man’s existence—graceful, neatly packed, light burdens in appearance, but in truth, terribly heavy and soul-crushing.”
“Yet many accept such burdens gayly!” interrupted Ferrari, with a smile. I glanced at him keenly.
“Men seldom attain the mastery over their own passions,” I replied; “they are in haste to seize every apparent pleasure that comes in their way. Led by a hot animal impulse which they call love, they snatch at a woman’s beauty as a greedy school-boy snatches ripe fruit—and when possessed, what is it worth? Here is its emblem”—and I held up the stone of the peach I had just eaten—“the fruit is devoured—what remains? A stone with a bitter kernel.”
Ferrari shrugged his shoulders.
“I cannot agree with you, count,” he said; “but I will not argue with you. From your point of view you may be right—but when one is young, and life stretches before you like a fair pleasure-ground, love and the smile of woman are like sunlight falling on flowers! You too must have felt this—in spite of what you say, there must have been a time in your life when you also loved!”
“Oh, I have had my fancies, of course!” I answered, with an indifferent laugh. “The woman I fancied turned out to be a saint—I was not worthy of her—at least, so I was told. At any rate, I was so convinced of her virtue and my own unworthiness—that—I left her.”
He looked surprised. “An odd reason, surely, for resigning her, was it not?”