'You knew her whole secret?'
'Yes, from the very first. She did not exactly remember whether she came here for the first time on the second or the third of May; but I knew very well it was on a Sunday, the first of May. She confessed to having been here about fifteen times, but I knew better—that she had come eighteen times. I am Minister of Home Affairs. But I do not reproach her, and I am not reproaching you; you are right to love each other.'
Sangiorgio humbly raised his head to look the grief-smitten old husband in the eyes.
'Of course,' he resumed, 'Angelica being handsome and young and clever, she required some young person like herself, entirely devoted to her, who would appreciate all her good, lovely qualities, who would live the life of the spirit and the heart together with her. Instead, she has a withered, disbelieving, ruined old man, who has an old and greedy passion to feed—ambition, the exacting, absorbing, furious passion of men over forty.
'It is natural that Angelica should prefer you to me. As for you, who know how to love, and still want to, who have no ambition, who do not yet know that fever of the soul which never can be stilled, who have a heart full of trust and an imagination full of enthusiasm, you prefer the sweet intoxication of love to everything else. Who could possibly find fault with you? It is you who are the wiser; we are the fools. We deserve to be tricked and deceived; we are striving for a vulgar sham, you for a divine reality! I cannot blame you.'
Sangiorgio listened, with his face buried in his hands, without proffering a word.
'Further than that,' Don Silvio went on, as if soliloquizing, 'that great thing called man, that power, that force, that combination of forces, is governed by a certain law which imposes a restriction upon his achievements. Do this, and nothing else, says this law, if you do not want to be feeble and insufficient in both. One single, strong, intense, profound passion you may entertain; one single, high, distant, unattainable ideal you may cherish; and your soul must be completely devoted to this sole passion, from which nothing must make you swerve, and your soul must be wholly bent upon that one ideal if you want to reach it. Love, art, politics, science, these great human activities, these highest forms of passion, and the ideal, all go their own separate roads; and so stupendous are they that the miserable mind of a man can scarcely get his grasp on one of them. A man cannot be a scientist and an artist, nor a politician and a lover, without failing in both the things he wants to do. We must take our choice; the great human interests of mind and heart are selfish, and demand heavy sacrifices.'
'What is Donna Angelica's wish?' asked Sangiorgio briefly, rousing himself from the long spell of meditation in which he had been immersed.
'That you leave Rome, Sangiorgio,' answered Don Silvio.