"I am so earthly," she went on. "I have prayed for a better nature, for an angelic heart, raised above all human desires, that I might simply love you, and wish for nothing else. I have exhausted myself with prayers and tears, trying thus to forget that you could not care for me. I have forbidden myself the great comfort of writing to you. I left Naples, and came here, far from you—from you who were, who are my light, my life. In vain, I have passed whole days here, praying to my mother and to the Madonna to free me from these terrible, heavy, earthly chains that bind me to that longing to be loved, and that are killing me. No use, no use! My prayers have not been answered. I have come away from them with a greater ardour, a more intense longing, than ever. I am a woman. I am a woman who doesn't know how to lift herself above womanly things, who, womanlike, longs to be loved, and who will never, never be consoled for the love she cannot have."
After a long pause, he asked, "And what do you wish me to do, Anna?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"There is nothing to be done. All is ended; all is over. Or, rather, nothing has ever been begun."
"Anna, I assure you, it grieves me to see you suffer."
"Thank you. But what can you do for me? It is all due to my own folly. I admit that I am unbalanced, extravagant. I know it. I am paying dearly for my folly; ah, the expiation is hard. It is all due to my one mistake, my one fault. Everybody is very kind to me, more than kind. But I have sinned, and I must expiate my sin."
"But how is it all to end?" he cried.
"Do you know what the simplest solution would be?"
"What?"