"My dear, you are a bore—that's what you are."
"What do you say?" she asked, not understanding.
"You're a bore, my dear."
The insult was so atrocious, that for the first time in the course of their talk her eyes filled with tears, and a sigh burst from her lips—lips that were purple, like those of a dying child. It seemed as if something had broken in her heart.
"Nothing but a bore. I don't employ high-sounding words, you see. I speak the plain truth. You're a bore."
Another sigh, a sigh of insupportable physical pain, as if the hard word bore had cut her flesh, like a knife.
"You flatter yourself that you're a woman of grand passions," he went on, after looking at his watch, and giving a little start of surprise to see how much time he had wasted here. "No? You flatter yourself that you're a creature of impulse, a woman with a fate, a woman destined to a tragic end; and to satisfy this notion, you complicate and embroil and muddle up your own existence, and mortally bore those who are about you. With your rhetoric, your tears, your sobs, your despair, your interminable letters, your livid face and your gray lips, you're enough to bore the very saints in heaven."
He pretended not to see her imploring eyes, which had suddenly lost their anger, and were craving mercy.
"Remember all the stupidities you've committed in the past four or five years," he went on, "and all the annoyance you've given us. You were a handsome girl, rich, with a good name. You might have married any one of a dozen men of your own age, your own rank, gentlemen, who were in love with you. That would have been sensible, orderly; you would have been as happy as happy can be. But what! Anna Acquaviva, the romantic heroine, condescend to be happy! No, no. That were beneath her! So you had to fancy yourself in love with a beggar whom you couldn't marry."