"It is easy to say that," she went on finally, with a feeble voice. "But you know I am a weak creature. That is why you have so much compassion for me. I shall never be cured, Cesare."
"Are you sure?"
"I am sure. I have tried. My love has proved itself stronger than I. It is destroying me. My heart can no longer endure it."
He looked off into the clear air of the night, watching the spiral of his cigarette smoke.
"And all those beautiful spiritual promises," he said, "that wonderful structure of abnegation, of sacrifice, of unrequited love, has come to nothing! Those plans for the future, which you conceived in such lofty unselfishness, have failed?"
"Failed, failed," she exclaimed, with a sigh, gazing up at the starry sky, as if to reproach it with her own unhappiness. "All that I wrote to you was absurd, a passing illusion. All my plans were based upon absurdities. Perhaps there are people in the world who are so perfectly made that they can be contented to love and not be loved in return; they are fortunate, they are noble; they live only for others; they are purity incarnate. But I am a miserable, selfish woman, nothing else; I have expected too much; and I am dying of my selfishness, of my pride."
She raised herself in her chair, grasping its arms nervously with her hands, and shaking her beautiful head, wasted by grief.
He was silent. He threw away his cigarette, which had gone out.
The soft moonlight covered all things.