The violet twilight deepened. The collegians stood still in the grounds, near the parapet, looking at some of the windows that reflected the sun’s last rays, at the distant sea that was turning to iron grey, at the swallows that shot like arrows across the roofs with the shrill cry that is their evensong.
Giovanna Casacalenda confessed to Maria Vitali that the hour of twilight made her long to die a sudden death, so that they might embalm her, dress her in a white satin gown, and loosen her long hair under a wreath of roses ... and after a hundred years a poet might fall in love with her. Artemisia Minichini assumed her most lugubrious air, her fists were doubled up in her apron pockets, there was a deep furrow across her forehead, and her lips were pursed up. Carolina Pentasuglia, the blonde, romantic, little sentimentalist, told Ginevra Avigliana that she wished herself far away in Denmark, on the shore of the Northern Sea, on a deserted strand, where the north wind howls through the fir-trees. Even Cherubina Friscia forgot her part of eavesdropper, and with vague eyes and listless hands meditated upon a whole life to be passed within College walls, without friends or relations, a poor old maid, hated by the girls.
“I think,” said Lucia to Caterina, “that my father intends marrying again. He has not dared to before, but human patience is so fragile a thing! My father is worldly, he does not understand me. My presence saddens him. He would like to have a merry, thoughtless girl in the house, who would enliven it. I am not the one for that.”
“But what will you do? Something will have to be done, Lucia.”
“Yes, something I will do, not for myself, but for others. Great undertakings call for great sacrifices. If I were a man, I would go to Africa and explore unknown regions. If I were a man, I would be a monk, a missionary to China or Japan, far, far away. But I am a woman, a weak, useless woman.”
“You could stay with your father, meanwhile.”
“No, his is a tardy youth, and mine a precocious old age. My presence in his house would be a continual reproach. Well, listen, I shall try to come upon a good, noble, holy idea, to which I can consecrate my mind and my energy. I will seek for a plague to lessen, an injustice to remove, a wrong to right, everywhere I will search for the ideal of humanity, to which I may sacrifice my life. I know not what I shall do, as yet I know not. But either as a Sister of the Red Cross on the battlefield, or as a Sister of Charity in the hospitals, or as a visitor in prisons, or as founder and teacher in some orphan asylum, I shall dedicate the strength and the courage of a wasted existence to the alleviation of human suffering.”
Caterina did not answer. Lucia contemplated her friend with the faintest shade of disdain on her lips.
“Will it not be a beautiful life, Caterina?”
“Very beautiful. Will your people give their consent?”