Now, it is done. United, forever united. Having arisen to their feet, she with an elegant and light impulse, like a lily, wind-lifted on its stem; he with a little effort and difficulty, wearied by emotion, they go down from the altar arm-in-arm. Now they pass through the church amid the murmurs of compliments which arise amid the shadows of the aisles, among the dull scraping of feet and the rustle of gowns; there on the peristyle, among the white columns, is a living wave of sun and air which comes to meet them, like a recall to real life, outside of the mystic dream of the church, the creaking of the line of carriages that advanced, the slow descent of the steps, with the white train of the bride spreading and dragging upon the stairs, in folds like snow, soft and light; then the carriages depart; they are alone for the first time, in the narrow space of the carriage, which the bridal dress fills with its whiteness, and the bouquet of orange-blossoms with its acute perfume of intoxicating virginity; and it is then that, conquered by the charm of that face, so delicate and proud amid its large pallid curls, by the splendor of those blue eyes, the elderly bridegroom bends over her to kiss her—
“Dear me, dear me....”
And to see the tranquility with which those finely cut, rose-colored lips return the kisses, through the veil, the question arises whether it is the bridegroom that she kisses, or the Mechlin lace, at five hundred the metre.
* * * * *
Ah! there were adorers around that beautiful signora Marchis, so lovely and so young, married to an old man! It was expected that this fortress would be an easy one to conquer. Precisely on her wedding day, Vico Molise, the most elegant and skeptical of the journalists of Upper Italy, had propounded to his friends this theorem:
“Given a beautiful girl, very poor; given that she marries a rich old man; divide the number of his years by that of the hundreds of thousands of lire of which she becomes mistress, and you will have the number of months necessary for her to take a lover.”
And as soon as he could, he began, with many others, to attempt the demonstration of that theorem.
Well, this time the impeccable psychological diagnosis of Vico Molise had been found to fail. Not only, after some months, the beautiful signora Marchis had no lover, but it appeared also that she never was to have one.
Always dressed with an adorable elegance, with a luxury full of good taste, the beautiful Gemma loved to amuse herself, moving freely in that society new for her, finding herself in her right place as a marvelous plant in a vase of valuable porcelain, developing itself in all its splendor. She went to dances, to the theatre, enjoying the plebiscite of admiration provoked by her beauty, coquetting a little with her adorers, fluttering about the fire in order to make them sparkle, her wings of a golden butterfly; but never letting herself be burned.
In the very moment of a declaration, in the midst of one of those waltzes whose notes seem made on purpose to stifle expiring virtue in their serpentine spirals, she cut short her adorer by turning her angelic head, and saying serenely: