Although she went to bed late, she got up early in the morning, from an early Northern habit she had never been able to shake off. No one was allowed in her room, not even her maid. Angelica insisted that no one should intrude into the sacred nook of her nocturnal thoughts and dreams and slumbers. Did he, Sangiorgio, not think a bedroom was a sanctuary, to be free from profane intrusion? Yes, he thought so, she was quite right, he would reply, greatly agitated, with a fire burning his entrails. Donna Angelica only permitted her maid to do her hair and dress her when she went to balls; she detested the officious hands of servants about her body, their vulgar babble, the contact of their fingers with her hair, all of which shocked and disgusted her. Long ago, as a young girl, finding the length of her tresses annoying when she combed her hair, she had had it cut short, and had begun to wear the dark coiled headdress of an adult. One day, when she spoke of this in whispers, as in a dream, Sangiorgio humbly asked her to let her hair down, as he had never seen how long it was. She simply said no; that she would never have time to arrange it again; that it took an hour. He repeated the request in vain. She promised to do it some other day, when she would have more time with him.
After her toilet, Donna Angelica spent a couple of hours in her little sitting-room next to her bedroom, reading, writing, dreaming, always alone.
She answered the notes of her friends up there, and the people who sent her applications, and those who wanted recommendations. She wrote very fast, always using white paper, without crest, motto, or monogram; the like of these, to which other women were devoted, she considered cheap, vulgar.
One day he asked her to write something on paper, a line merely, since he had never had a written word from her; and she would perhaps have done it, but Sangiorgio searched the apartment in vain, unable to lay his hands on either an inkstand, a pen, or a sheet of paper. In this house, intended for love, there were naturally lacking the things intended for study, for business, for everything that was not love.
She remarked, with a smile, that he evidently never wrote. No, he never wrote, he said—he only loved; and Angelica, still smiling, signed to him to stop. She would not listen to any of this, would not come back if he continued.
And the delightful, fascinating confidences would go on.
At half-past eleven she usually met Don Silvio at lunch. She was always hungry in the morning, like all young and healthy people. She would like to be chatting and laughing with someone as young and lively as herself at that cheerful hour of the day, but Don Silvio was at that hour always bursting with anger or the morning's annoyances, was never hungry, because the disease of politics had ruined his liver and stomach; and all through the meal he read newspapers and letters, and wrote at the table, just as he did in his drawing-room at the Braschi mansion, in the Chamber, and everywhere. Ah! she preferred to the company of that lean, old, pertinacious devourer of newspapers, letters, and telegrams, who let his cutlet get cold on his plate, who forgot to eat his fruit, in his daily fit of bile—to this she preferred being alone, with the sun casting a long ray on the table, with the music of a piano near by, with the buzz of the noonday flies when the weather was warm. And, seized with one of the strange caprices that pure women have, she proposed to Sangiorgio to go into the country quite early some morning, to one of the little inns with terraces arboured by creeping vines, and to have a meal together, as truant schoolboys might.
'But why do you torture me? why do you tell me this?' he asked, gently reproachful.
'Do I torture you?'
'You would never go.'