“What, please?” she asked, toying with her emerald rings.
“Your betrayal; your flight with Marco Fiore; your three years’ life with him. It is impossible to forget all this, and this recollection scorches me like a red-hot iron.”
“Still,” she said, with some disingenuousness, and the same frivolity in which she had kept up the conversation politely from the beginning, “still you desired my return to your house.”
“I confess it; I ardently desired it.”
“You condescended, then, to pardon an unfaithful wife,” she concluded, with a gracious and slight smile, a conventional smile to conclude a worldly discourse.
“It is true, I pardoned you,” he replied, still more gloomily: “but I repented of it at once; I repent it every day.”
“You think you made a mistake?”
“Much more than a mistake; far more than a mistake!” he exclaimed, raising his voice suddenly.
She motioned to him courteously with her hand, just as if she were asking him to talk more quietly in a room where music was being played.
“I committed a cowardice in pardoning you. I was a fool and a coward. Every one laughs at me; every one. You yourself will laugh at me. There couldn’t be a bigger fool or coward than I was on that evening.”