"I like it," he said, and put the fan down.
She was burning with a desire to take it, to touch what he had touched, but she dared not.
Cesare Dias leaned forward a little, to look at the stage. He was so close to her, it seemed to Anna that she could hear him breathe.
For her own part, a sort of intoxication, due no doubt in some measure to the passionate art of the great composer, whose music surged like a flood about her, had mounted from her heart to her brain; she was conscious of nothing save a great world of love, save the near presence of Cesare Dias. Her soul held a new and precious treasure, a new joy. She delighted herself with the illusion that the beating of her own heart was the beating of Cesare's. She forgot everything—the place, the time, the future, youth, age, beauty, everything; motionless, with her eyes cast down, she seemed to float in a wave of soft warm light, aware of one single sweet sensation, his nearness to her. She had forgotten the stage, the people round her, Stella Martini, her sister Laura; the music itself was only a distant echo; her whole being was concentrated in an ecstasy, which she hoped might never end. She did not dare to move or speak, lest she might thereby wake from her heavenly dream. She had again entered anew into the land of passion. She was one of those natures which, having ceased to love, begin again to love.
"I could die like this," she thought.
She felt that she could die thus, in a divine moment, when new love, young and strong, has not yet learned the lessons of sorrow, of shame, of worldly wickedness, that await it; it would be sweet to die with one's illusions undisturbed, to die in the fulness of youth, before one's ideals have begun to decay; to die loving, rather than to live to see love die.
So, on the stage, Raoul and Valentina, victims of an irrepressible but impossible passion, were calling upon Heaven for death, praying to be allowed to die in their divine moment of love. Anna, recoiling from the thought of the future, with its inevitable vicissitudes, struggles, tears, and disappointments, realised the fascination of death. Involuntarily, she looked at Cesare. He smiled upon her, and thereat she too smiled, like his faithful image in a mirror. And her sublime longing to die, disappeared before the reality of his smile.
She looked at him again, but this time he was intent upon the scene. Anna felt that her love was being sung for her by the artists there, by Raoul and Valentina.
Cesare said to her, "How beautiful it is!"
"It is beautiful," she murmured, bowing her head.