"I only see you," he said.
"You are a barbarian. You only see your own ideas. When did you leave
Switzerland?"
"A week ago."
"What have you been doing since then?"
"I don't know. I stopped, by chance, at a place by the sea. I never noticed its name. I slept for a week. Slept, with my eyes open. I do not know what I have seen, or what I have dreamed. I think I was dreaming of you. I know that it was very beautiful. But the most lovely part of it all is that I forgot everything…."
"Thank you!" she said.
(He did not listen.)
"… Everything," he went on. "Everything that was then, everything that had been before. I am a new man. I am beginning to live again."
"It is true," she said, looking into his laughing eyes. "You have changed since we last met."
He looked at her, too, and found her no less different from his memory of her. Not that she had changed in two months, but he was seeing her with new eyes. Yonder, in Switzerland, the image of old days, the faint shadow of the girl Grazia, had flitted between his gaze and this new actual beloved. Now, in the sun of Italy, the dreams of the North had melted away: in the clear light of day he saw her real soul and body. How far removed she was from the little, wild, imprisoned girl of Paris, how far from the woman with the smile like Saint John, whom he had met one evening, shortly after her marriage, only to lose her again! Out of the little Umbrian Madonna had flowered a lovely Roman lady: