The conquest of Rome

by Matilde Serao

'No, my dear friend, but you may take pleasure in it. Many beautiful and good things in life are false in their essence. It is wisdom to profit by them, to take them as they are, without asking any more.'

And she cast at him a fugitive, rapid glance. He understood at once. In that little room the same perspicacity came to his aid which during the day had assisted him in his boldness before the Chamber.

'Love is like that, too,' he murmured.

'Particularly love,' remarked the Countess Elena Fiammanti, opening wide her large gray eyes, which that evening were tinted with blue. 'Have you ever been very much in love, Sangiorgio?'

'Never much, and besides——'

'Very well. When you do fall in love, remember what I say. Love is a great thing, but not the best. One must not ask more of it than it can give. But a man is exacting, a man is selfish, a man insists on being the object of a passion, and then—the woman lies. The sentiment of love is really an ordinary one; there are some stronger; love is an ephemeral thing, and often accomplishes nothing.'

And while she uttered her romantic paradoxes with a slight touch of pedantry, her crimson lips gleamed in their humidity, her hand ruffled the natural curls over her forehead, she swung her plump little foot backward and forward, whose skin was visible through the black silk, perforated stocking. Sangiorgio, feeling very much at home, looked at her with a rather fatuous smile, which, being absorbed in her paradoxes, she probably did not notice.

Throwing her cigarette into the fire, Elena continued:

'Women also want to be deluded. "Those traitors of men do not know how to love!" you hear them cry; and then they weep and wail. They must have faithfulness—a pretty story, good enough to be palmed off on children! As if they could be faithful! As if they had no fibres, blood, imagination—destructive, all of these, to constancy! A hundred thousand lire reward to anyone who will bring me a man and a woman who are truly faithful, absolutely faithful!'

Francesco Sangiorgio had taken her uplifted hand in his. He toyed lightly with her fingers, with her diamond rings. He more than once playfully bent his head over the hand, and finally kissed it on the vein in the wrist. Donna Elena was no longer in the least formidable to him; he seemed to be quite intimate with her already; vulgar ideas began surging into his mind. What intoxication remained from the events of the day, aided by this feminine atmosphere all redolent with corylopsis, by this alluring woman, by her language become common by force of paradox, turned his head. To assert his new intimacy with Donna Elena, he would have liked to stretch himself out on a sofa, or fling himself on the carpet, or throw matches into the fire—in fact, to conduct himself as impertinently as an ill-bred boy. He resisted these temptations through an exertion of will; nevertheless, he was incited by the ironical smile which gave Donna Elena's nether lip a disdainful curve, the light tremor of the nostrils of that prominent aquiline nose, the combined refinement and coarseness of that face. Quite gently he took the rings off her left hand and dandled them in his own; and in the state of inebriation which had seized upon him his strongest wish was to slip off one of her shoes, to see her little foot bend bashfully in her stocking.