“I have nothing to do with my life, that is all,” she concluded, coldly and gloomily, looking at the gnarled trunk of a very old tree.
He was silent and troubled.
“Still, two years ago in returning to your home——” he resumed.
“That tragic and grotesque farce has ended with my husband as the travesty of a hero, and with me as a travesty of a penitent!” she exclaimed with a sneer.
“O Donna Maria!” he exclaimed, shocked.
“You already know that Emilio hates and despises me,” she continued, with an increasingly mordant irony. “He must have told you. Among men you discuss these things.”
Provana was silent, but he had an air of agreeing.
“All this for having wished to pardon me, dear Provana. Pardon wasn’t in him, neither was it in me.”
“And why?”
“Because pardon is a great thing, when the soul remains great that accords it—a pardon complete and absolute; but in the other case what a miserable, humiliating, and insulting thing a pardon is!”