He understood the hidden meaning of her phrase, and felt hurt by it. That skinny creature, with her ethereal airs and graces, knew how to sting, after all! She suddenly appeared to him under a new aspect. A slight fear of the woman, whose weakness was her only strength, overcame him. He began to feel ill at ease in the perfumed atmosphere; the room was so small that he could not stretch out his arms without coming to fisticuffs with the wall, the air so perfumed that it compressed his lungs; ill at ease with that long, lithe figure draped in a piece of Eastern stuff; a woman who had a mouth like a red rose, and eyes that shone as if they sometimes saw marvellous visions, and at others looked as if they were dying in an ecstasy of unknown longing. He felt a weight in his head like the beginning of a headache. He would like to have let in air by putting his fists through the window-panes, to have knocked down the walls by a push from his shoulders, to have taken up the piano and thrown it into the street; anything to shake off the torpor that was creeping over him. If he could only grasp that lithe figure in his arms, to hurt her, to hear her bones creak, to strangle her! The blood rushed to his head and it was getting heavier every minute. She was looking at him, examining him, while she waved the peacock-feather fan to and fro. Perhaps she divined it all, for without saying a word she rose and went to open the window, standing there a few minutes to watch the passers-by. When she returned, there was a faint flush on her face.
“Well,” she said, as if she were awaiting the end of a discourse.
“Well; your perfumes have given me a headache. It’s a wonder I did not faint; a thing that never yet happened to me, and that I should not like to happen. May I go? May I give you Caterina’s message?”
“I am listening to you. But are you better now?”
“I am quite well. I am not Alberto Sanna.”
“No, you are not Alberto Sanna,” she repeated, softly. “He is ill, I pity him. How do you feel now?”
“Why, very well indeed. It was a passing ailment, walking will set me up again. Caterina....”
“Do you love your wife as much as I love her?”
“Eh! what a question!”
“Don’t take any notice of it; it escaped me. I don’t believe in married love.”