“Quite intolerable!”
“We will not extend to ourselves the forbearance due to erring humanity. This puts us too much on a level with the rest—is that not often the reason of our harsh self-judgments?”
“Oh, I have no doubt there is something mean and conceited at the bottom of it!” exclaimed Hadria.
There was a step on the lawn behind them.
The Professor sprang up. He went to meet Valeria and they came to the table together, talking. Valeria’s eyes were bright and her manner animated. Yes, she was going abroad. It would be delightful to meet somewhere, if chance favoured them. She thought of Italy. And at that magic name, they fell into reminiscences of former journeyings; they talked of towns and temples and palaces, of art, of sunshine; and Hadria listened silently.
Once, in her girlhood, when she was scarcely sixteen, she had gone with her parents and Algitha for a tour in Italy. It was a short but vivid experience which had tinged her life, leaving a memory and a longing that never died. The movement of travel, the sense of change and richness offered to eye and mind, remained with her always; the vision of a strange, tumultuous, beautiful world; of exquisite Italian cities, of forests and seas; of classic plains and snow-capped mountains; of treasures of art—the eternal evidence of man’s aloofness, on one side of him, from the savage element in nature—and glimpses of cathedral domes and palace walls; and villages clinging like living things to the hill-sides, or dreaming away their drowsy days in some sunny valley. And then the mystery that every work of man enshrines; the life, the thought, the need that it embodies, and the passionate histories that it hides! It was as if the sum and circumstance of life had mirrored itself in the memory, once and for all. The South lured her with its languor, its colour, its hot sun, and its splendid memories. It was exquisite pleasure and exquisite pain to listen to the anticipations of these two, who were able to wander as they would.
“Siena?” said Valeria with a sigh, “I used to know Siena when I was young and happy. That was where I made the fatal mistake in my life. It is all a thing of the past now. I might have married a good and brilliantly intellectual man, whom I could respect and warmly admire; for whom I had every feeling but the one that we romantic women think so essential, and that people assure us is the first to depart.”
“You regret that you held fast to your own standard?” said Hadria.
“I regret that I could not see the wisdom of taking the good that was offered to me, since I could not have that which I wished. Now I have neither.”
“How do you know you would have found the other good really satisfactory!”