"Yes," I said, "I remember now. Some of Suor Teresa's counsels I've followed, but others, I fear, I threw to the winds. She was a good woman—a very good woman, Suor Teresa. Do you remember how she used to lecture us girls, and say: 'When you are women of the world, how wide is the prospect which opens before you—how various the claims upon your attention—how vast your capabilities—how deep the responsibility which those capabilities involve! In the first place, you are not alone; you are one of a family—of a social circle—of a community—of a nation. You are a being whose existence will never terminate, who must live for ever, and whose happiness or misery through that endless future which lies before you will be influenced by the choice you are now in the act of making.' Do you remember the kind of lectures she used to give us?"
"Perfectly well," answered Velia. "But she is dead, poor woman; she died of fever last summer."
"Dead!" I echoed
A pang of regret shot through my heart, for I remembered how sweet and kind she had always been, how just and how devout in all her religion. To her I owed many stimulating ideas about good and evil, few of which, I fear, remained long enough in my memory. It was she who taught me to love the virtuous and the good, and the recollection of those early days of her tender guidance formed a bright spot in my life, to which, I suppose, the mind will take me back at intervals as long as existence lasts.
Velia was about my own age, and at the convent we had treated one another as if we were sisters. Therefore when we fell to talking of those old days before the courses of our lives ran so far apart, my memory drifted back to those home-truths which Suor Teresa and her fellow-nuns had striven to instil into our rather fickle minds.
My fellow-guests left about five o'clock, for they had arranged to continue on the sea-road and ascend to the famed pilgrimage church of Montenero—one of the sights of Western Tuscany. As I had made a pilgrimage there in my school-days, at Velia's invitation I remained behind to dine with her, promising Ulrica to return on board later in the evening.
In the glorious blaze of crimson sunset which flooded the broad, clear Mediterranean, causing the islands of Gorgona, Capraja, and Corsica to stand out in purple grandeur in the infinite blaze of gold, I sat upon the marble terrace, lolling in a long cane chair, and chatting with the Countess.
How different had been our lives, I reflected. She, married happily, surrounded by every comfort that wealth could provide, a child which was her idol, and a husband whom she adored; while I, one of those unattached women who form the flotsam of society, world-weary, forlorn, and forsaken, was beaten hither and thither up and down Europe by every gust of the social wind.
I contrasted our lives, and found my own to be a hollow and empty sham. Of all the passions which take possession of the female breast, a passion for society is one of the most inimical to domestic enjoyment. Yet how often does this exist in connection with an amiable exterior! It is not easy to say whether one ought most to pity or to blame a woman who lives for society—a woman who reserves all her good spirits, all her pretty frocks, her animated looks, her interesting conversation, her bland behaviour, her smiles, her forbearance, her gentleness, for society. What imposition does she not practise upon those who meet her there! Follow the same individual home; she is impatient, fretful, sullen, weary, oppressed with headache, uninterested in all that passes around her, and dreaming only of the last evening's excitement, or of what may constitute the amusement of the next; while the mortification of her friends at home is increased by the contrast her behaviour exhibits in the two different situations, and her expenditure upon comparative strangers of feelings to which they consider themselves to have a natural and inalienable right. I was terribly conscious of my own failings in this respect, and in society Ulrica had been my chief example.
I hated it all, and envied the woman who sat there chatting with me so merrily.