THE INEVITABLE

THE WORKS OF LOUIS COUPERUS

Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

THE BOOKS OF THE SMALL SOULS

• I. [Small Souls]
• II. [The Later Life]
• III. [The Twilight of the Souls]
• IV. [Dr. Adriaan]

Also

• Old People and the Things that Pass
• [Ecstasy]
• [The Tour]
• The Inevitable

THE INEVITABLE

BY
LOUIS COUPERUS
TRANSLATED BY
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1920

Copyright, 1920,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK

THE INEVITABLE

CHAPTER I

The Marchesa Belloni’s boarding-house was situated in one of the healthiest, if not one of the most romantic quarters of Rome. One half of the house had formed part of a villino of the old Ludovisi Gardens, those beautiful old gardens regretted by everybody who knew them before the new barrack-quarters were built on the site of the old Roman park, with its border of villas. The entrance to the pension was in the Via Lombardia. The older or villino portion of the house retained a certain antique charm for the marchesa’s boarders, while the new premises built on to it offered the advantages of spacious rooms, modern sanitation and electric light. The pension boasted a certain reputation for comfort, cheapness and a pleasant situation: it stood at a few minutes’ walk from the Pincio, on high ground, and there was no need to fear malaria; and the price charged for a long stay, amounting to hardly more than eight lire, was exceptionally low for Rome, which was known to be more expensive than any other town in Italy. The boarding-house therefore was generally full. The visitors began to arrive as soon as October: those who came earliest in the season paid least; and, with the exception of a few hurrying tourists, they nearly all remained until Easter, going southward to Naples after the great church festivals.

Some English travelling-acquaintances had strongly recommended the pension to Cornélie de Retz van Loo, who was travelling in Italy by herself; and she had written to the Marchesa Belloni from Florence. It was her first visit to Italy; it was the first time that she had alighted at the great cavernous station near the Baths of Diocletian; and, standing in the square, in the golden Roman sunlight, while the great fountain of the Acqua Marcia gushed and rippled and the cab-drivers clicked with their whips and their tongues to attract her attention, she was conscious of her “nice Italian sensation,” as she called it, and felt glad to be in Rome.

She saw a little old man limping towards her with the instinct of a veteran porter who recognizes his travellers at once; and she read “Hotel Belloni” on his cap and beckoned to him with a smile. He saluted her with respectful familiarity, as though she were an old acquaintance and he glad to see her; asked if she had had a pleasant journey, if she was not over-tired; led her to the victoria; put in her rug and her hand-bag; asked for the tickets of her trunks; and said that she had better go on ahead: he would follow in ten minutes with the luggage. She received an impression of cosiness, of being well cared for by the little old lame man; and she gave him a friendly nod as the coachman drove away. She felt happy and careless, though she had just the faintest foreboding of something unhappy and unknown that was going to happen to her; and she looked to right and left to take in the streets of Rome. But she saw only houses upon houses, like so many barracks; then a great white palace, the new Palazzo Piombino, which she knew to contain the Juno Ludovisi; and then the vettura stopped and a boy in buttons came out to meet her. He showed her into the drawing-room, a gloomy apartment, in the middle of which was a table covered with periodicals, arranged in a regular and unbroken circle. Two ladies, obviously English and of the æsthetic type, with loose-fitting blouses and grimy hair, sat in a corner studying their Baedekers before going out. Cornélie bowed slightly, but received no bow in return; she did not take offence, being familiar with the manners of the travelling Briton. She sat down at the table and took up the Roman Herald, the paper which appears once a fortnight and tells you what there is to do in Rome during the next two weeks.

Thereupon one of the ladies asked her, from the corner, in an aggressive tone:

“I beg your pardon, but would you please not take the Herald to your room?”

Cornélie raised her head very haughtily and languidly in the direction where the ladies were sitting, looked vaguely above their grimy heads, said nothing and glanced down at the Herald again; and she thought herself a very experienced traveller and smiled inwardly because she knew how to deal with that type of Englishwoman.

The marchesa entered and welcomed Cornélie in Italian and in French. She was a large, fat matron, vulgarly fat; her ample bosom was contained in a silk cuirass or spencer, shiny at the seams and bursting under the arms; her grey frizzled hair gave her a somewhat leonine appearance; her great yellow and blue eyes, with bistre shadows beneath them, wore a strained expression, the pupils unnaturally dilated by belladonna; a pair of immense crystals sparkled in her ears; and her fat, greasy fingers were covered with nameless jewels. She talked very fast; and Cornélie thought her sentences as pleasant and homely as the welcome of the lame porter in the square outside the station. The marchesa led her to the lift and stepped in with her; the hydraulic lift, a railed-in cage, running up the well of the staircase, rose solemnly and suddenly stopped, motionless, between the second and the third floor.

“Third floor!” cried the marchesa to some one below.

“Non c’e acqua!” the boy in buttons calmly called back, meaning thereby to convey that—as seemed natural—there was not enough water to move the lift.

The marchesa screamed out some orders in a shrill voice; two facchini came running up and hung on to the cable of the lift, together with the ostensibly zealous boy in buttons; and by fits and starts the cage rose higher and higher, until at last it almost reached the third storey.

“A little higher!” ordered the marchesa.

But the facchini strained their muscles in vain: the lift refused to stir.

“We can manage!” said the marchesa. “Wait a bit.”

Taking a great stride, which revealed the enormous white-stockinged calf of her leg, she stepped on to the floor, smiled and gave her hand to Cornélie, who imitated her gymnastics.

“Here we are!” sighed the marchesa, with a smile of satisfaction. “This is your room.”

She opened a door and showed Cornélie a room. Though the sun was shining brightly out of doors, the room was as damp and chilly as a cellar.

“Marchesa,” Cornélie said, without hesitation, “I wrote to you for two rooms facing south.”

“Did you?” asked the marchesa, plausibly and ingenuously. “I really didn’t remember. Yes, that is one of those foreigners’ ideas: rooms facing south.... This is really a beautiful room.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t accept this room, marchesa.”

La Belloni grumbled a bit, went down the corridor and opened the door of another room:

“And this one, signora?... How do you like this?”

“Is it south?”

“Almost”

“I want it full south.”

“This looks west: you see the most splendid sunsets from your window.”

“I absolutely must have a south room, marchesa.”

“I also have the most charming little apartments looking east: you get the most picturesque sunrises there.”

“No, marchesa.”

“Don’t you appreciate the beauties of nature?”

“Just a little, but I put my health first.”

“I sleep in a north room myself.”

“You are an Italian, marchesa, and you’re used to it.”

“I’m very sorry, but I have no rooms facing south.”

“Then I’m sorry too, marchesa, but I must look out somewhere else.”

Cornélie turned as though to go away. The choice of a room sometimes means the choice of a life.

The marchesa caught hold of her hand and smiled. She had abandoned her cool tone and her voice was all honey:

“Davvero, that’s one of those foreigners’ ideas: rooms facing south! But I have two little kennels left. Here....”

And she quickly opened two doors, two snug little cupboards of rooms, which showed through the open windows a lofty and spacious view of the sky, outspread above the streets and roofs below, with the blue dome of St. Peter’s in the distance.

“These are the only rooms I have left facing south,” said the marchesa, plaintively.

“I shall be glad to have these, marchesa.”

“Sixteen lire,” smiled la Belloni.

“Ten, as you wrote.”

“I could put two persons in here.”

“I shall stay all the winter, if I am satisfied.”

“You must have your way!” the marchesa exclaimed, suddenly, in her sweetest voice, a voice of graceful surrender. “You shall have the rooms for twelve lire. Don’t let us discuss it any more. The rooms are yours. You are Dutch, are you not? We have a Dutch family staying here: a mother with two daughters and a son. Would you like to sit next to them at table?”

“No, I’d rather you put me somewhere else; I don’t care for my fellow-countrymen when travelling.”

The marchesa left Cornélie to herself. She looked out of the window, absent-mindedly, glad to be in Rome, yet faintly conscious of the something unhappy and unknown that was going to happen. There was a tap at her door; the men carried in her luggage. She saw that it was eleven o’clock and began to unpack. One of her rooms was a small sitting-room, like a bird-cage in the air, looking out over Rome. She altered the position of the furniture, draped the faded sofa with a shawl from the Abruzzi and fixed a few portraits and photographs with drawing-pins to the wall, whose white-washed surface was broken up by rudely-painted arabesques. And she smiled at the border of purple hearts transfixed by arrows, which surrounded the decorated panels of the wall.

After an hour’s work her sitting-room was settled: she had a home of her own, with a few of her own shawls and rugs, a screen here, a little table there, cushions on the sofa, books within easy reach. When she had finished and had sat down and looked around her, she suddenly felt very lonely. She began to think of the Hague and of what she had left behind her. But she did not want to think and picked up her Baedeker and read about the Vatican. She was unable to concentrate her thoughts and turned to Hare’s Walks in Rome. A bell sounded. She was tired and her nerves were on edge. She looked in the glass, saw that her hair was out of curl, her blouse soiled with coal and dust, unlocked a second trunk and changed her things. She cried and sobbed while she was curling her hair. The second bell rang; and, after powdering her face, she went downstairs.

She expected to be late, but there was no one in the dining-room and she had to wait before she was served. She resolved not to come down so very punctually in future. A few boarders looked in through the open door, saw that there was no one sitting at table yet, except a new lady, and disappeared again.

Cornélie looked around her and waited.

The dining-room was the original dining-room of the old villa, with a ceiling by Guercina. The waiters loitered about. An old grey major-domo cast a distant glance over the table, to see if everything was in order. He grew impatient when nobody came and told them to serve the macaroni to Cornélie. It struck Cornélie that he too limped with one leg, like the porter. But the waiters were very young, hardly more than sixteen to eighteen, and lacked the waiter’s usual self-possession.

A stout gentleman, vivacious, consequential, pock-marked, ill-shaven, in a shabby black coat which showed but little linen, entered, rubbing his hands, and took his seat, opposite Cornélie.

He bowed politely and began to eat his macaroni.

And this seemed to be the signal for the others to begin eating, for a number of boarders, mostly ladies, now came in, sat down and helped themselves to the macaroni, which was handed round by the youthful waiters under the watchful eye of the grey-haired major-domo. Cornélie smiled at the oddity of these travelling types; and, when she involuntarily glanced at the pock-marked gentleman opposite, she saw that he too was smiling.

He hurriedly mopped up his tomato-sauce with his bread, bent a little way across the table and almost whispered, in French:

“It’s amusing, isn’t it?”

Cornélie raised her eyebrows:

“What do you mean?”

“A cosmopolitan company like this.”

“Oh, yes!”

“You are Dutch?”

“How do you know?”

“I saw your name in the visitors’ book, with ‘la Haye’ after it.”

“I am Dutch, yes.”

“There are some more Dutch ladies here, sitting over there: they are charming.”

Cornélie asked the major-domo for some vin ordinaire.

“That wine is no good,” said the stout gentleman, vivaciously. “This is Genzano,” pointing to his fiasco. “I pay a small corkage and drink my own wine.”

The major-domo put a pint bottle in front of Cornélie: it was included in her pension without extra charge.

“If you like, I will give you the address where I get my wine. Via della Croce, 61.”

Cornélie thanked him. The pock-marked gentleman’s uncommon ease and vivacity diverted her.

“You’re looking at the major-domo?” he asked.

“You are a keen observer,” she smiled in reply.

“He’s a type, our major-domo, Giuseppe. He used to be major-domo in the palace of an Austrian archduke. He did I don’t know what. Stole something, perhaps. Or was impertinent. Or dropped a spoon on the floor. He has come down in the world. Now you behold him in the Pension Belloni. But the dignity of the man!”

He leant forward:

“The marchesa is economical. All the servants here are either old or very young. It’s cheaper.”

He bowed to two German ladies, a mother and daughter, who had come in and sat down beside him:

“I have the permit which I promised you, to see the Palazzo Rospigliosi and Guido Reni’s Aurora” he said, speaking in German.

“Is the prince back then?”

“No, the prince is in Paris. The palace is not open to visitors, except yourselves.”

This was said with a gallant bow.

The German ladies exclaimed how kind he was, how he was able to do anything, to find a way out of every difficulty. They had taken endless trouble to bribe the Rospigliosi porter and they had not succeeded.

A little thin Englishwoman had taken her seat beside Cornélie.

“And for you, Miss Taylor, I have a card for a low mass in His Holiness’ private chapel.”

Miss Taylor was radiant with delight.

“Have you been sight-seeing again?” the pock-marked gentleman continued.

“Yes, Museo Kircheriano,” said Miss Taylor. “But I am tired out. It was most exquisite.”

“My prescription, Miss Taylor, is that you stay at home this afternoon and rest.”

“I have an engagement to go to the Aventino....”

“You mustn’t. You’re tired. You look worse every day and you’re losing flesh. You must rest, or you sha’n’t have the card for the low mass.”

The German ladies laughed. Miss Taylor, flattered, in an ecstasy of delight, gave her promise. She looked at the pock-marked gentleman as though she expected to hear the judgement of Solomon fall from his lips.

Lunch was over: the rump-steak, the pudding, the dried figs. Cornélie rose:

“May I give you a glass out of my bottle?” asked the stout gentleman. “Do taste my wine and tell me if you like it. If so, I’ll order a fiasco for you in the Via della Croce.”

Cornélie did not like to refuse. She sipped the wine. It was deliciously pure. She thought that it would be a good thing to drink a pure wine in Rome; and, as she reflected, the stout gentleman seemed to read her quick thought:

“It is a good thing,” he said, “to drink a strengthening wine while you are in Rome, where life is so tiring.”

Cornélie agreed.

“This is Genzano, at two lire seventy-five the fiasco. It will last you a long time: the wine keeps. So I’ll order you a fiasco.”

He bowed to the ladies around and left the room.

The German ladies bowed to Cornélie.

“Such an amiable man, that Mr. Rudyard.”

“What can he be?” Cornélie wondered. “French, German, English, American?”

CHAPTER II

She had hired a victoria after lunch and had driven through Rome, to make her first acquaintance with the city for which she had longed so eagerly. This first impression was a great disappointment. Her unspoiled imagination, her reading, even the photographs which she had bought in Florence and studied with the affection of an inexperienced tourist had given her the illusion of a city of an ideal antiquity, an ideal Renascence; and she had forgotten that, especially in Rome, life has progressed pitilessly and that the ages are not visible, in buildings and ruins, as distinct periods, but that each period is closely connected with the next by the passing days and years.

Thus she had thought the dome of St. Peter’s small, the Corso narrow and Trajan’s Column a column like any other; she had not noticed the Forum as she drove past it; and she had been unable to think of a single emperor when she was at the Palatine.

Now she was home again, tired, and was resting a little and meditating; she felt depressed, yet she enjoyed her vague reflections and the silence about her in the big house, to which most of the boarders had not yet returned. She thought of the Hague, of her big family, her father, mother, brothers and sisters, to whom she had said good-bye for a long time to go abroad. Her father, a retired colonel of hussars living on his pension, with no great private means, had been unable to contribute anything to the fulfilment of her caprice, as he called it; and she would not have been able to satisfy that caprice, of beginning a new life, but for a small legacy which she had inherited some years ago from a godmother. She was glad to be more or less independent, though she felt the selfishness of her independence.

But what could she have done for her family-circle, after the scandal of her divorce? She was weak and selfish, she knew it; but she had received a blow under which she had at first expected to succumb. And, when she found herself surviving it, she had mustered such energy as she possessed and said to herself that she could not go on existing in that same narrow circle of her sisters and her girl friends; and she had forced her life into a different path. She had always had the knack of creating an apparently new frock out of an old dress, transforming a last year’s hat into one of the latest fashion. Even so she had now done with her distraught and wretched life, all battered and broken as it was: she had gathered together, as in a fit of economy, all that was left, all that was still serviceable; and out of those remnants she had made herself a new existence. But this new life was unable to breathe in the old atmosphere: it felt aimless in it and estranged; and she had managed to force it into a different path, in spite of all the opposition of her family and friends. Perhaps she would not have succeeded so readily if she had not been so completely shattered. Perhaps she would not have felt this energy if she had suffered only a little. She had her strength and she had her weakness; she was very simple and yet she was very various; and it was perhaps just this complexity that had been the saving of her youth.

Besides, she was actually very young, only twenty-three; and in youth one possesses an unconscious vitality, notwithstanding any apparent weakness. And her contradictory qualities gave her equilibrium and saved her from falling over into the abyss....

All this passed vaguely through her mind as clouds pass before the eyes, not with the conciseness of words but with the misty indefiniteness of a dreamy fatigue. As she lay there, she did not look as if she had ever exerted the strength to give a new path to her life: a pale, delicate woman, slender, with drooping movements, lying on a sofa in her not very fresh dressing-gown, with its faded pink and its rumpled lace. And yet there was a certain poetical fragrance about her personality, despite her weary eyes and the limp outlines of her attire, despite the boarding-house room, with its air of quickly improvised comfort, a comfort which was a matter of tact rather than reality and could be packed away in a single trunk. Her frail figure, her pale and delicate rather than beautiful features were surrounded, as by an aura, by that atmosphere of personal poetry which she unconsciously radiated, which she shed from her eyes upon the things which she beheld, from her fingers upon the things which she touched. To those who did not like her, this peculiar atmosphere, this unusualness, this eccentricity, this unlikeness to the typical young woman of the Hague, was the very thing with which they reproached her. To those who liked her, it was partly talent, partly soul; something peculiar to her which seemed almost genius; yet it was perturbing. It invested her with a great charm; it gave pause for thought and it promised much: more, perhaps, than could be realized. And this woman was the child of her time but especially of her environment and therefore so unfinished, revealing disparity against disparity, in an equilibrium of opposing forces, which might be her undoing or her salvation, but were in either case her fate.

She felt lonely in Italy. She had stayed for weeks at Florence, where she tried to lead a full life, enriched by art and history. There, it was true, she forgot herself to a great extent, but she still felt lonely. She had spent a fortnight at Siena, but Siena had depressed her, with its sombre streets, its dead palaces; and she had yearned for Rome. But she had not found Rome yet that afternoon. And, though she felt tired, she felt above all things lonely, terribly lonely and useless in a great world, in a great town, a town in which one feels the greatness, uselessness and vast antiquity of things more perhaps than anywhere else. She felt like a little atom of suffering, like an insect, an ant, half-trodden, half-crushed, among the immense domes of Rome, of whose presence out of doors she was subtly conscious.

And her hand wandered vacantly over her books, which she had stacked punctiliously and conscientiously on a little table: some translations of the classics, Ovid, Tacitus, together with Dante, Petrach, Tasso. It was growing dusk in her room, there was no light to read by, she was too much enervated to ring for a lamp; a chilliness hovered in her little room, now that the sun had quite gone down, and she had forgotten to ask for a fire on that first day. Loneliness was all about her, her suffering pained her; her soul craved for a fellow-soul, but her mouth craved for a kiss, her arms for him, once her husband; and, turning on her cushions and wringing her hands, she prayed deep down in herself:

“O God, tell me what to do!”

CHAPTER III

At dinner there was a buzz of voices; the three or four long tables were all full; the marchesa sat at the head of the centre table. Now and then she beckoned impatiently to Giuseppe, the old major-domo, who had dropped a spoon at an archducal court; and the unfledged little waiters rushed about breathlessly. Cornélie found the obliging stout gentleman, whom the German ladies called Mr. Rudyard, sitting opposite her and her fiasco of Genzano beside her plate. She thanked Mr. Rudyard with a smile and made the usual remarks: how she had been for a drive that afternoon and had made her first acquaintance with Rome, the Forum, the Pincio. She talked to the German ladies and to the English one, who was always so tired with her sight-seeing; and the Germans, a Baronin and the Baronesse her daughter, laughed with her at the two æsthetes whom Cornélie had come upon that morning in the drawing-room. The two were sitting some distance away, lank and angular, grimy-haired, in curiously cut evening-dress, which showed the breast and arms warmly covered with a Jaeger undervest, on which, in their turn, lay strings of large blue beads. Their eyes browsed over the long table, as though they were pitying everybody who had come to Rome to learn about art, because they two alone knew what art was. While eating, which they did unpleasantly, almost with their fingers, they read æsthetic books, wrinkling their brows and now and then looking up angrily, because the people about them were talking. With their self-conceit, their impossible manners, their worse than tasteless dress and their great air of superiority, they represented types of travelling Englishwomen that are never met except in Italy. They were unanimously criticized at the table. They came to the Pension Belloni every winter and made drawings in water-colours in the Forum or the Via Appia. And they were so remarkable in their unprecedented originality, in their grimy angularity, with their evening-dresses, their Jaegers, their strings of blue beads, their æsthetic books and their meat-picking fingers, that all eyes were constantly wandering in their direction, as though under the influence of a Medusa spell.

The young baroness, a type out of the Fliegende Blätter, witty and quick, with her little round, German face and arched, pencilled eyebrows, was laughing with Cornélie and showing her a thumb-nail caricature which she had made of the two æsthetic ladies in her sketch-book, when Giuseppe conducted a young lady to the end of the table where Cornélie and Rudyard sat opposite each other. She had evidently just arrived, said “Evening” to everybody near her and sat down with a great rustling. It was at once apparent that she was an American, almost too good-looking, too young, to be travelling alone like that, with a smiling self-possession, as if she were at home: a very white complexion, very fine dark eyes, teeth like a dentist’s advertisement, her full breast moulded in mauve cloth plentifully decorated with silver braid, on her heavily-waved hair a large mauve hat with a cascade of black ostrich-feathers, fastened by an over-large paste buckle. At every movement the silk of her petticoat rustled, the feathers nodded, the paste buckle gleamed. And, notwithstanding all this showiness, she was child-like: she was perhaps just twenty, with an ingenuous expression in her eyes. She at once spoke to Cornélie, to Rudyard; said that she was tired, that she had come from Naples, that she had been dancing last night at Prince Cibo’s, that her name was Miss Urania Hope, that her father lived in Chicago, that she had two brothers who, in spite of her father’s money, were working on a farm in the Far West, but that she had been brought up as a spoilt child by her father, who, however, wanted her to be able to stand on her own feet and was therefore making her travel by herself in the Old World, in dear old Italy. She was delighted to hear that Cornélie was also travelling alone; and Rudyard chaffed the ladies about their modern views, but the Baronin and the Baronesse applauded them. Miss Hope at once took a liking to her Dutch fellow-traveller and wanted to arrange joint excursions; but Cornélie, withdrawing into herself, made a tactful excuse, said that her time was fully engaged, that she wanted to study in the museums.

“So serious?” asked Miss Hope, respectfully.

And the petticoat rustled, the plumes nodded, the paste buckle gleamed.

She made on Cornélie the impression of a gaudy butterfly, which, sportive and unthinking, might easily one day dash itself to pieces against the hot-house windows of our cabined existence. She felt no attraction towards this strange, pretty little creature, who looked like a child and a cocotte in one; but she felt sorry for her, she did not know why.

After dinner, Rudyard proposed to take the two German ladies for a little walk. The younger baroness came to Cornélie and asked if she would come too, to see Rome by moonlight, quite close, from the Villa Medici. She felt grateful for the kindly suggestion and was just going to put on her hat, when Miss Hope ran after her:

“Stay and sit with me in the drawing-room.”

“I am going for a walk with the Baronin,” Cornélie replied.

“That German lady?”

“Yes.”

“Is she a noblewoman?”

“I presume so.”

“Are there many titled people in the house?” asked Miss Hope, eagerly.

Cornélie laughed:

“I don’t know. I only arrived this morning.”

“I believe there are. I heard that there were many titled people here. Are you one?”

“I was!” Cornélie laughed. “But I had to give up my title.”

“What a shame!” Miss Hope exclaimed. “I love titles. Do you know what I’ve got? An album with the coats of arms of all sorts of families and another album with patterns of silk and brocade from each of the Queen of Italy’s ball-dresses. Would you care to see it?”

“Very much indeed!” Cornélie laughed. “But I must put on my hat now.”

She went and returned in a hat and cloak; the German ladies and Rudyard were waiting in the hall and asked what she was laughing at. She caused great merriment by telling them about the album with the patterns of the queen’s ball-dresses.

“Who is he?” she asked the Baronin, as she walked in front with her, along the Via Sistina, while the Baronesse and Rudyard followed.

She thought the Baronin a charming person, but she was surprised to find, in this German woman, who belonged to the titled military-class, a coldly cynical view of life which was not exactly that of her Berlin environment.

“I don’t know,” the Baronin answered, with an air of indifference. “We travel a great deal. We have no house in Berlin at present. We want to make the most of our stay abroad. Mr. Rudyard is very pleasant. He helps us in all sorts of ways: tickets for a papal mass, introductions here, invitations there. He seems to have plenty of influence. What do I care who or what he is! Else agrees with me. I accept what he gives us and for the rest I don’t try to fathom him.”

They walked on. The Baronin took Cornélie’s arm:

“My dear child, don’t think us more cynical than we are. I hardly know you, but I’ve felt somehow drawn towards you. Strange, isn’t it, when one’s abroad like this and has one’s first talk at a table-d’hôte, over a skinny chicken? Don’t think us shabby or cynical. Oh, dear, perhaps we are! Our cosmopolitan, irresponsible, unsettled life makes us ungenerous, cynical and selfish. Very selfish. Rudyard shows us many kindnesses. Why should I not accept them? I don’t care who or what he is. I am not committing myself in any way.”

Cornélie looked round involuntarily. In the nearly dark street she saw Rudyard and the young Baronesse, almost whispering and mysteriously intimate.

“And does your daughter think so too?”

“Oh, yes! We are not committing ourselves in any way. We do not even particularly like him, with his pock-marked face and his dirty finger-nails. We merely accept his introductions. Do as we do. Or ... don’t. Perhaps it will be better form if you don’t. I ... I have become a great egoist, through travelling. What do I care?...”

The dark street seemed to invite confidences; and Cornélie to some extent understood this cynical indifference, particularly in a woman reared in narrow principles of duty and morality. It was certainly not good form; but was it not weariness brought about by the wear and tear of life? In any case she vaguely understood it: that tone of indifference, that careless shrugging of the shoulders....

They turned the corner of the Hotel Massier and approached the Villa Medici. The full moon was pouring down its flood of white radiance and Rome lay in the flawless blue glamour of the night. Overflowing the brimming basin of the fountain, beneath the black ilexes, whose leafage held the picture of Rome in an ebony frame, the waste water splashed and clattered.

“Rome must be very beautiful,” said Cornélie, softly.

Rudyard and the Baronesse had come nearer and heard what she said:

“Rome is beautiful,” he said, earnestly. “And Rome is more. Rome is a great consolation to many people.”

His words, spoken in the blue moonlit night, impressed her. The city seemed to lie in mystical billows at her feet. She looked at him, as he stood before her in his black coat, showing but little linen, the same stout, civil gentleman. His voice was very penetrating, with a rich note of conviction in it. She looked at him long, uncertain of herself and vaguely conscious of an approaching intimation, but still antipathetic.

Then he added, as though he did not wish her to meditate too deeply the words which he had uttered:

“A great consolation to many ... because beauty consoles.”

And she thought his last words an æsthetic commonplace; but he had meant her to think so.

CHAPTER IV

Those first days in Rome tired Cornélie greatly. She did too much, as every one does who has just arrived in Rome; she wanted to take in the whole city at once; and the distances, although covered in a carriage, and the endless galleries in the museums resulted in producing physical exhaustion. Moreover she was constantly experiencing disappointments, in respect of pictures, statues or buildings. At first she dared not own to these disappointments; but one afternoon, feeling dead-tired, after she had been painfully disappointed in the Sistine Chapel, she owned up to herself. Everything that she saw that was already known to her from her previous studies disappointed her. Then she resolved to give sight-seeing a rest. And, after those fatiguing days, when every morning and every afternoon was spent out of doors, it was a luxury to surrender herself to the unconscious current of daily life. She remained at home in the mornings, wrapped in a tea-gown, in her cosy little bird-cage of a sitting-room, writing letters, dreaming a little, with her arms folded behind her head; she read Ovid and Petrarch, or listened to a couple of street-musicians, who, with their quavering tenors, to the shrill whining of their guitars, filled the silent street with a sobbing passion of music. At lunch she considered that she had been lucky in her pension, in her little corner at the table. She was interested in Baronin von Rothkirch, with her indifferent, aristocratic condescension towards Rudyard, because she saw how residence abroad can draw a person out of the narrow ring of caste principles. The young Baronesse, who cared nothing about life and merely sketched and painted, interested her because of her whispering intimacy with Rudyard, which she failed to understand. Miss Hope was so ingenious, so childishly irrational, that Cornélie could not imagine how old Hope, the rich stockinet-manufacturer over in Chicago, allowed this child to travel about alone, with her far too generous monthly allowance and her total ignorance of the world and people; and Rudyard himself, though she sometimes felt an aversion for him, attracted her in spite of that aversion. Although she had so far formed no deeper friendship with any of her fellow-boarders, at any rate they were people to whom she was able to talk; and the conversation at table was a diversion amid the solitude of the rest of the day.

For in the afternoons, during this period of fatigue and disappointment, she would merely go for a short walk by herself down the Corso or on the Pincio and then return home, make her own tea in her little silver tea-pot and sit dreaming by the log fire, in the dusk, until it was time to dress for dinner.

And the brightly-lit dining-room with the Guercino ceiling was gay and cheerful. The pension was crammed: the marchesa had given up her own room and was sleeping in the bath-room. A hum of voices buzzed around the tables; the waiters rushed to and fro; spoons and forks clattered. There was none of the melancholy spirit of so many tables-d’hôte. The people knew one another; and the excitement of Roman life, the oxygen in the Roman air seemed to lend an added vivacity to the gestures and conversation. Amidst this vivacity the two grimy æsthetic ladies attracted attention by their unvarying pose, with their eternal evening-dress, their Jaegers, their beads, the fat books which they read, their angry looks because people were talking.

After dinner they sat in the drawing-room or in the hall, made friends here and there and talked about Rome, Rome, Rome. There was always a great fuss about the music in the different churches: they consulted the Herald; they asked Rudyard, who knew everything, and gathered round him; and he, fat and polite as ever, smiled and distributed tickets and named the day and hour at which an important service would be held in this church or in that. To English ladies, who were not fully informed, he would now and then, as it were casually, impart details about the complexities of Catholic ritual and the Catholic hierarchy; he explained the nationalities denoted by the various colours of the seminarists whom you met in shoals of an afternoon on the Pincio, staring at St. Peter’s, in ecstasy over St. Peter’s, the mighty symbol of their mighty religion; he set forth the distinction between a church and a basilica; he related anecdotes of the private life of Leo XIII. His manner of speaking of all these things possessed an insinuating charm: the English ladies, greedy for information, hung on his lips, thought him too awfully nice, asked him for a thousand particulars.

These days were a great rest for Cornélie. She recovered from her fatigue and felt indifferent towards Rome. But she did not think of leaving any the sooner. Whether she was here or elsewhere was all the same to her: she had to be somewhere. Besides, the pension was good, her fellow-boarders pleasant and cheerful. She no longer read Hare’s Walks in Rome or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but she read Ouida’s Ariadne over again. She did not care for the book as much as she had done three years before, at the Hague; and after that she read nothing. But she amused herself with the von Rothkirch ladies for a whole evening, looking over Miss Hope’s album of seals and collection of patterns. How mad those Americans were on titles and royalties! The Baronin good-naturedly contributed an impression of her own arms to the album. And the patterns were greatly admired: gold brocades; silks heavily interwoven with silver; spangled tulles. Miss Hope related how she had come by them: she knew one of the queen’s waiting-women, who had formerly been in service with an American; and this waiting-woman was now able to procure the patterns for her at a high price: a precious bit of material picked up while the queen was trying on, or sometimes even cut out of a broad seam. The child was prouder of her collection of patterns than an Italian prince of his paintings, said Baronin von Rothkirch. But, notwithstanding this absurdity, this vanity, Cornélie came to like the pretty American girl because of her candid and unsophisticated nature. She looked most attractive in the evening, in a black low-cut dress, or in a rose chiffon blouse. For that matter, it was a different frock every night. She possessed a kaleidoscopic collection of dresses, blouses and jewels. She would walk through the ruins of the Forum in a tailor-made suit of cream cloth, lined with orange silk; and her white lace petticoat flitted airily over the foundations of the Basilica Julia or the Temple of Vesta. Her gaily-trimmed hats introduced patches of colour from Regent Street or the Avenue de l’Opéra into the tragic seriousness of the Colosseum or the ruined palace of the Palatine. The young Baronesse teased her about her orange silk lining, so in harmony with the Forum, about her hats, so in keeping with the seriousness of a place of Christian martyrdom, but she was never angry:

“It’s a nice hat anyway!” she would say, in her Yankee drawl, which always afforded a good view of her pretty teeth but made her strain her mouth as though she were cracking filberts.

And the child enjoyed everything, enjoyed the Baronin and the Baronesse, enjoyed being at a pension kept by a decayed Italian marchioness. And, as soon as she caught sight of the Marchesa Belloni’s grey, leonine head, she would make a rush for her—because a marchioness is higher than a baroness, said Madame von Rothkirch—drag her into a corner and if possible monopolize her throughout the evening. Rudyard would then join them; and Cornélie, seeing this, wondered what Rudyard was, who he was and what he was about. But this did not interest the Baronin, who had just received a card for a mass in the papal chapel; and the young Baronesse merely said that he told legends of the saints so nicely, when explaining the pictures to her in the Doria and the Corsini.

CHAPTER V

One evening Cornélie made the acquaintance of the Dutch family beside whom the Marchesa had first wished to place her at table: Mrs. van der Staal and her two daughters. They too were spending the whole winter in Rome: they had friends there and went out visiting. The conversation flowed smoothly; and mevrouw invited Cornélie to come and have a chat in her sitting-room. Next day she accompanied her new acquaintances to the Vatican and heard that mevrouw was expecting her son, who was coming to Rome from Florence to continue his archæological studies.

Cornélie was glad to meet at the hotel a Dutch element that was not antipathetic. She thought it pleasant to talk Dutch again and she confessed as much. In a day or two she had become intimate with Mrs. van der Staal and the two girls; and on the evening when young Van der Staal arrived she opened her heart more than she had ever thought that she could do to strangers whom she had known for barely a few days.

They were sitting in the Van der Staal’s sitting-room, Cornélie in a low chair by the blazing log-fire, for the evening was chilly. They had been talking about the Hague, about her divorce; and she was now speaking of Italy, of herself:

“I no longer see anything,” she confessed. “Rome has quite bewildered me. I can’t distinguish a colour, an outline. I don’t recognize people. They all seem to whirl round me. Sometimes I feel a need to sit alone for hours in my bird-cage upstairs, to recollect myself. This morning, in the Vatican, I don’t know: I remember nothing. It is all grey and fuzzy around me. Then the people in the boarding-house: the same faces every day. I see them and yet I don’t see them. I see ... I see Madame von Rothkirch and her daughter, I see the fair Urania ... and Rudyard ... and the little Englishwoman, Miss Taylor, who is always so tired with sight-seeing and who thinks everything most exquisite. But my memory is so bad that, when I am alone, I have to think to myself: Madame von Rothkirch is tall and stately, with the smile of the German Empress—she is rather like her—talking fast and yet with indifference, as though the words just fell indifferently from her lips....”

“You’re a good observer,” said Van der Staal.

“Oh, don’t say that!” said Cornélie, almost vexed. “I see nothing and I can’t remember. I receive no impressions. Everything around me is colourless. I really don’t know why I have come abroad.... When I am alone, I think of the people whom I meet. I know Madame von Rothkirch now and I know Else. Such a round, merry face, with arched eyebrows, and always a joke or a witticism: I find it tiring sometimes, she makes me laugh so. Still they are very nice. And the fair Urania. She tells me everything. She is as communicative ... as I am at this moment. And Rudyard: I see him before me too.”

“Rudyard!” smiled mevrouw and the girls.

“What is he?” Cornélie asked, inquisitively. “He is so civil, he ordered my wine for me, he can always get one all sorts of cards.”

“Don’t you know what Rudyard is?” asked Mrs. van der Staal.

“No; and Mrs. von Rothkirch doesn’t know either.”

“Then you had better be careful,” laughed the girls.

“Are you a Catholic?” asked mevrouw.

“No.”

“Nor the fair Urania either? Nor Mrs. von Rothkirch?”

“No.”

“Well, that is why la Belloni put Rudyard at your table. Rudyard is a Jesuit. Every pension in Rome has a Jesuit who lives there free of charge, if the proprietor is a good friend of the Church, and who tries to win souls by making himself especially agreeable.”

Cornélie refused to believe it.

“You can take my word for it,” mevrouw continued, “that in a pension like this, a first-class pension, a pension with a reputation, a great deal of intrigue goes on.”

“La Belloni?” Cornélie enquired.

“Our marchesa is a thorough-paced intrigante. Last winter, three English sisters were converted here.”

“By Rudyard?”

“No, by another priest. Rudyard is here for the first time this winter.”

“Rudyard walked quite a long way with me in the street this morning,” said young Van der Staal. “I let him talk, I heard all he had to say.”

Cornélie fell back in her chair:

“I am tired of people,” she said, with the strange sincerity which was hers. “I should like to sleep for a month, without seeing anybody.”

And, after a short pause, she got up, said goodnight and went to bed, while everything swam before her eyes.

CHAPTER VI

She remained indoors for a day or two and had her meals served in her room. One morning, however, she was going for a stroll in the Villa Borghese, when she met young Van der Staal, on his bicycle.

“Don’t you ride?” he asked, jumping off.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It is an exercise which doesn’t suit my style,” Cornélie replied, vexed at meeting any one who disturbed the solitude of her stroll.

“May I walk with you?”

“Certainly.”

He gave his machine into the charge of the porter at the gate and walked on with her, quite naturally, without saying very much:

“It’s beautiful here,” he remarked.

His words seemed to convey a simple meaning. She looked at him, for the first time, attentively.

“You’re an archæologist?” she asked.

“No,” he said, deprecatingly.

“What are you, then?”

“Nothing. Mamma says that, just to excuse me. I am nothing and a very useless member of society at that. And I am not even well off.”

“But you are studying, aren’t you?”

“No. I do a little casual reading. My sisters call it studying.”

“Do you like going about, as your sisters do?”

“No, I hate it. I never go with them.”

“Don’t you like meeting and studying people?”

“No. I like pictures, statues and trees.”

“A poet?”

“No. Nothing. I am nothing, really.”

She looked at him, with increased attention. He was walking very simply by her side, a tall, thin fellow of perhaps twenty-six, more of a boy than a man in face and figure, but endowed with a certain assurance and restfulness that made him seem older than his years. He was pale; he had dark, cool, almost reproachful eyes; and his long, lean figure, in his badly-kept cycling-suit, betrayed a slight indifference, as though he did not care what his arms and legs looked like.

He said nothing but walked on pleasantly, unembarrassed, without finding it necessary to talk. Cornélie, however, grew fidgety and sought for words:

“It is beautiful here,” she stammered.

“Oh, it’s very beautiful!” he replied, calmly, without seeing that she was constrained. “So green, so spacious, so peaceful: those long avenues, those vistas of avenues, like an antique arch, over yonder; and, far away in the distance, look, St. Peter’s, always St. Peter’s. It’s a pity about those queer things lower down: that restaurant, that milk-tent. People spoil everything nowadays.... Let us sit down here: it is so lovely here.”

They sat down on a bench.

“It is such a joy when a thing is beautiful,” he continued. “People are never beautiful. Things are beautiful: statues and paintings. And then trees and clouds!”

“Do you paint?”

“Sometimes,” he confessed, grudgingly. “A little. But really everything has been painted already; and I can’t really say that I paint.”

“Perhaps you write too?”

“There has been even more written than painted, much more. Perhaps everything has not yet been painted, but everything has certainly been written. Every new book that is not of absolute scientific importance is superfluous. All the poetry has been written and every novel too.”

“Do you read much?”

“Hardly at all. I sometimes dip into an old author.”

“But what do you do then?” she asked, suddenly, querulously.

“Nothing,” he answered, calmly, with a glance of humility. “I do nothing, I exist.”

“Do you think that a good mode of existence?”

“No.”

“Then why don’t you adopt another?”

“As I might buy a new coat or a new bicycle?”

“You’re not speaking seriously,” she said, crossly.

“Why are you so vexed with me?”

“Because you annoy me,” she said, irritably.

He rose, bowed civilly and said:

“Then I had better go for a turn on my bicycle.”

And he walked slowly away.

“What a stupid fellow!” she thought, peevishly.

But she thought it tiresome that she had wrangled with him, because of his mother and his sisters.

CHAPTER VII

At the hotel, however, he spoke to Cornélie politely, as though there had been no embarrassment, no wrangling interchange of words between them, and he even asked her quite simply—because his mother and sisters had some calls to pay that afternoon—whether they should go to the Palatine together.

“I passed it the other day,” she said, indifferently.

“And don’t you intend to see the ruins?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They don’t interest me. I can’t see the past in them. I merely see ruins.”

“But then why did you come to Rome?” he asked, irritably.

She looked at him and could have burst into sobs:

“I don’t know,” she said, meekly. “I could just as well have gone somewhere else. But I had formed a great idea of Rome; and Rome disappoints me.”

“How so?”

“I find it hard and inexorable and devoid of feeling. I don’t know why, but that’s the impression it makes upon me. And I am in a mood at present which somehow makes me want something less insensible and imperturbable.”

He smiled:

“Come along,” he said. “Come with me to the Palatine. I must show you Rome. It is so beautiful.”

She felt too much depressed to remain alone; and so she put on her things and left the hotel with him. The cabmen outside cracked their whips:

“Vole? Vole?” they shouted.

He picked out one:

“This is Gaetano,” he said. “I always take him. He knows me, don’t you, Gaetano?”

“Si, signorino. Cavallo di sangue, signorina!” said Gaetano, pointing to his horse.

They drove away.

“I am always frightened of these cabmen,” said Cornélie.

“You don’t know them,” he answered, smiling. “I like them. I like the people. They’re nice people.”

“You approve of everything in Rome.”

“And you submit without reserve to a mistaken impression.”

“Why mistaken?”

“Because that first impression of Rome, as hard and unfeeling, is always the same and always mistaken.”

“Yes, it’s that. Look, we are driving by the Forum. Whenever I see the Forum, I think of Miss Hope and her orange lining.”

He felt annoyed and did not answer.

“This is the Palatine.”

They alighted and passed through the entrance.

“This wooden staircase takes us to the Palace of Tiberius. Above the palace, on the top of the arches, is a garden from which we look down on the Forum.”

“Tell me about Tiberius. I know that there were good and bad emperors. We were taught that at school. Tiberius was a bad emperor, wasn’t he?”

“He was a dismal brute. But why do you want me to tell you about him?”

“Because otherwise I can take no interest in those arches and chambers.”

“Then let us go up to the top and sit in the garden.”

They did so.

“Don’t you feel Rome here?” he asked.

“I feel the same everywhere,” she replied.

But he seemed not to hear her:

“It’s the atmosphere around you,” he continued. “You should try to forget our hotel, to forget Belloni and all our fellow-visitors and yourself. When anybody first arrives here, he has all the usual trouble about the hotel, his rooms, the table-d’hôte, the vaguely likable or dislikable people. You’ve got over that now. Clear your mind of it. And try to feel only the atmosphere of Rome. It’s as if the atmosphere had remained the same, notwithstanding that the centuries lie piled up one above the other. First the middle ages covered the antiquity of the Forum and now it is hidden everywhere by our nineteenth-century craze for travel. There you have Miss Hope’s orange lining. But the atmosphere has always remained the same. Unless I imagine it....”

She was silent.

“Perhaps I do,” he continued. “But what does that matter to me? Our whole life is imagination; and imagination is a beautiful thing. The beauty of our imagination is the consolation of our lives, to those of us who are not men of action. The past is beauty. The present is not, does not exist. And the future does not interest me.”

“Do you never think about modern problems?” she asked.

“The woman question? Socialism? Peace?”

“Well, yes, for instance.”

“No,” he smiled. “I think of them sometimes, but not about them.”

“How do you mean?”

“I get no further. That is my nature. I am a dreamer by nature; and my dream is the past.”

“Don’t you dream of yourself?”

“No. Of my soul, my inner self? No. It interests me very little.”

“Have you ever suffered?”

“Suffered? Yes, no. I don’t know. I feel sorry for my utter uselessness as a human being, as a son, as a man; but, when I dream, I am happy.”

“How do you come to speak to me so openly?”

He looked at her in surprise:

“Why should I be reticent about myself?” he asked. “I either don’t talk or I talk as I am doing now. Perhaps it is a little odd.”

“Do you talk to every one so intimately?”

“No, hardly to anybody. I once had a friend ... but he’s dead. Tell me, I suppose you consider me morbid?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I shouldn’t mind if you did. Oh, how beautiful it is here! Are you drinking Rome in with your very breath?”

“Which Rome?”

“The Rome of antiquity. Under where we are sitting is the Palace of Tiberius. I see him walking about there, with his tall, strong figure, with his large, searching eyes: he was very strong, he was very dismal and he was a brute. He had no ideals. Farther down, over there, is the Palace of Caligula, a madman of genius. He built a bridge across the Forum to speak to Jupiter in the Capitol. That’s a thing one couldn’t do nowadays. He was a genius and a madman. When a man’s like that, there’s a good deal about him to admire.”

“How can you admire an age of emperors who were brutes and mad?”

“Because I see their age before my eyes, in the past, like a dream.”

“How is it possible that you don’t see the present before you, with the problems of our own time, especially the eternal problem of poverty?”

He looked at her:

“Yes,” he said, “I know. That is my sin, my wickedness. The eternal problem of poverty doesn’t affect me.”

She looked at him contemptuously:

“You don’t belong to your period,” she said, coldly.

“No.”

“Have you ever felt hungry?”

He laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

“Have you ever pictured yourself leading the life of a labourer, of a factory-girl who works until she’s worn out and old and half-dead for a bare crust of bread?”

“Oh, those things are so horrible and so ugly: don’t talk about them!” he entreated.

The expression of her eyes was cold; the corners of her lips were depressed as though by a feeling of distaste; and she rose from her seat.

“Are you angry?” he asked, humbly.

“No,” she said, gently, “I am not angry.”

“But you despise me, because you consider me a useless creature, an æsthete and a dreamer?”

“No. What am I myself, that I should reproach you with your uselessness?”

“Oh, if we could only find something!” he exclaimed, almost in ecstasy.

“What?”

“An aim. But mine would always remain beauty. And the past.”

“And, if I had the strength of mind to devote myself to an aim, it would above all be this: bread for the future.”

“How abominable that sounds!” he said, rudely but sincerely. “Why didn’t you go to London, or Manchester, or one of those black manufacturing towns?”

“Because I hadn’t the strength of mind and because I think too much of myself and of a sorrow that I have had lately. And I expected to find distraction in Italy.”

“And that is where your disappointment lies. But perhaps you will gradually acquire greater strength and then devote yourself to your aim: bread for the future. I sha’n’t envy you, however: bread for the Future!...”

She was silent.

Then she said, coldly:

“It is getting late. Let us go home....”

CHAPTER VIII

Duco van der Staal had taken a large, vault-like studio, with a chilly north light, up three flights of stairs in the Via del Babuino. Here he painted, modelled and studied and here he dragged all the beautiful and antique objects that he succeeded in picking up in the little shops along the Tiber or in the Mercato dei Fiori. That was his passion: to hunt through Rome for a panel of an old triptych or a fragment of ancient sculpture. In this way his studio had not remained the large, chilly, vault-like workroom bearing witness to zealous and serious study, but had become a refuge for dim-coloured remnants of antiquity and ancient art, a museum for his dreaming spirit. Already as a child, as a boy, he had felt that passion for antiquity developing; he learnt how to rummage through the stocks of old Jewish dealers; he taught himself to haggle when his purse was not full; and he collected first rubbish and afterwards, gradually, objects of artistic and financial value. And it was his great hobby, his one vice: he spent all his pocket-money on it and, later, without reserve, the little that he was able to earn. For sometimes, very seldom, he would finish something and sell it. But generally he was too ill-satisfied with himself to finish anything; and his modest notion was that everything had already been created and that his art was useless.

This idea sometimes paralysed him for months together, without making him unhappy. When he had the money to keep himself going—and his personal needs were very small—he felt rich and was content in his studio or would wander, perfectly content, through the streets of Rome. His long, careless, lean, slender body was at such times clad in his oldest suit, which afforded an unostentatious glimpse of an untidy shirt with a soft collar and a bit of string instead of a tie; and his favourite headgear was a faded hat, battered out of shape by the rain. His mother and sisters as a rule found him unpresentable, but had given up trying to transform him into the well-groomed son and brother whom they would have liked to take to the drawing-rooms of their Roman friends. Happy to breathe the atmosphere of Rome, he would wander for hours through the ruins and see, in a dazzling vision of phantom columns, ethereal temples and translucent marble palaces looming up in a shimmering sunlit twilight; and the tourists going by with their Baedekers, who passed this long lean young man seated carelessly on the foundations of the Temple of Saturn, would never have believed in his architectural illusions of harmonious ascending lines, crowned by an array of statues in noble and god-like attitudes, high in the blue sky.

But he saw them before him. He raised the shafts of the pillars, he fluted the severe Doric columns, he bent and curved the cushioned Ionic capitals and unfurled the leaves of the Corinthian acanthuses; the temples rose in the twinkling of an eye, the basilicas shot up as by magic, the graven images stood white against the elusive depths of the sky and the Via Sacra became alive. He, in his admiration, lived his dream, his past. It was as though he had known preexistence in ancient Rome; and the modern houses, the modern Capitol and all that stood around the tomb of his Forum were invisible to his eyes.

He would sit like this for hours, or wander about and sit down again and be happy. In the intensity of his imagination, he conjured up history from the clouds of the past, first of all as a mist, a miraculous haze, whence the figures stepped out against the marble background of ancient Rome. The gigantic dramas were enacted before his dreaming eyes as on an ideal stage which stretched from the Forum to the hazy, sun-shot azure of the Campagna, with slips that lost themselves in the depths of the sky. Roman life came into being, with a toga’d gesture, a line of Horace, a sudden vision of an emperor’s murder or a contest of gladiators in the arena. And suddenly also the vision paled and he saw the ruins, the ruins only, as the tangible shadow of his unreal illusion: he saw the ruins as they were, brown and grey, eaten up with age, crumbled, martyred, mutilated with hammers, till only a few occasional pillars lifted and bore a trembling architrave, that threatened to come crashing to the ground. And the browns and greys were so richly and nobly gilded by splashes of sunlight, the ruins were so exquisitely beautiful in decay, so melancholy in their unwitting fortuitousness of broken lines, of shattered arches and mutilated sculpture, that it was as though he himself, after his airy vision of radiant dream-architecture, had tortured and mutilated them with an artist’s hand and caused them to burst asunder and shake and tremble, for the sake of their wistful aftermath of beauty. Then his eyes grew moist, his heart became more full than he could bear and he went away, through the Arch of Titus by the Colosseum, through the Arch of Constantine, on and on, and hurried past the Lateran to the Via Appia and the Campagna, where his smarting eyes drank in the blue of the distant Alban Hills, as though that would cure them of their excessive gazing and dreaming....

Neither in his mother nor in his sisters did he find a strain that sympathized with his eccentric tendencies; and, since that one friend who died, he had never found another and had always been lonely within and without, as though the victim of a predestination which would not allow him to meet with sympathy. But he had peopled his loneliness so densely with his dreams that he had never felt unhappy because of it; and, even as he loved roaming alone among the ruins and along the country-roads, so he cherished the privacy of his lonely studio, with the many silent figures on an old panel of some triptych, on a tapestry, or on the many closely hung sketches, all around him, all with the charm of their lines and colours, all with the silent gesture of their movement and emotion and all blending together in twilit corners or a shadowy antique cabinet. And in between all this lived his china and bronze and old silver, while the faded gold embroidery of an ecclesiastical vestment gleamed faintly and the old leather bindings of his books stood in comfortable brown rows, ready to give forth, when his hands opened them, images which mistily drifted upwards, living their loves and their sorrows in the tempered browns and reds and golds of the soundless atmosphere of the studio.

Such was his simple life, without much inward doubting, because he made no great demands upon himself, and without the modern artist’s melancholy, because he was happy in his dreams. He had never, despite his hotel life with his mother and sisters—he slept and took his meals at Belloni’s—met many people or concerned himself with strangers, being by nature a little shy of Baedekered tourists, of short-skirted English ladies, with their persistent little exclamations of uniform admiration, and feeling entirely impossible in the half-Italian, half-cosmopolitan set of his rather worldly mother and smart little sisters, who spent their time dancing and cycling with young Italian princes and dukes.

And, now that he had met Cornélie de Retz, he had to confess to himself that he possessed but little knowledge of human nature and that he had never learnt to believe in the reality of such a woman, who might have existed in books, but not in actual life. Her very appearance—her pallor, her drooping charm, her weariness—had astonished him; and her conversation astonished him even more: her positiveness mingled with hesitation; her artistic feeling modified by the endeavour to take part in her period, a period which he failed to appreciate as artistic, enamoured as he was of Rome and of the past. And her conversation astonished him, attractive though the sound of it was and offended as he often was by a recurrent bitterness and irony, followed again by depression and discouragement, until he thought it over again and again, until in his musing he seemed to hear it once more on her own lips, until she joined the busts and torsos in his studio and appeared before him in the lily-like frailness of her visible actuality, against the preraphaelite stiffness of line and the Byzantine gold and colour of the angels and madonnas on canvas and tapestry.

His soul had never known love; and he had always looked on love as imagination and poetry. His life had never known more than the natural virile impulse and the ordinary little love-affair with a model. And his ideas on love swayed in a too wide and unreal balance between a woman who showed herself in the nude for a few lire and Petrarch’s Laura; between the desire roused by a beautiful body and the exaltation inspired by Dante’s Beatrice; between the flesh and the dream. He had never contemplated an encounter of kindred souls, never longed for sympathy, for love in the full and pregnant sense of the word. And, when he began to think and to think long and often of Cornélie de Retz, he could not understand it. He had pondered and dreamed for days, for a week about a woman in a poem; on a woman in real life never.

And that he, irritated by some of her sayings, had nevertheless seen her stand with her lily-like outline against his Byzantine triptych, like a wraith in his lonely dreams, almost frightened him, because it had made him lose his peace of mind.

CHAPTER IX

It was Christmas Day, on which occasion the Marchesa Belloni entertained her boarders with a Christmas-tree in the drawing-room, followed by a dance in the old Guercino dining-room. To give a ball and a Christmas-tree was a custom with many hotel-keepers; and the pensions that gave no dance or Christmas-tree were known and numbered and were greatly blamed by the foreigners for this breach of tradition. There were instances of very excellent pensions to which many travellers, especially ladies, never went, because there was neither a dance nor a Christmas-tree at Christmas.

The marchesa realized that her tree was expensive and that her dance cost money too and she would gladly have found an excuse for avoiding both, but she dared not: the reputation of her pension, as it happened, depended on its worldliness and smartness, on the table-d’hôte in the handsome dining-room, where people dressed for dinner, and also on the brilliant party given at Christmas. And it was amusing to see how keen all the ladies were to receive gratis in their bill for a whole winter’s stay a trashy Christmas present and the opportunity of dancing without having to pay for a glass of orgeade and a bit of pastry, a sandwich and a cup of soup. Giuseppe, the old nodding major-domo, looked down contemptuously on this festivity: he remembered the gala pomp of his archducal evenings and considered the dance inferior and the tree paltry. Antonio, the limping porter, accustomed to his comparatively quiet life—fetching a visitor or taking him to the station; sorting the post twice a day at his ease; and for the rest pottering around his lodge and the lift—hated the dance, because of all the guests of the boarders, each of whom was entitled to invite two or three friends, and because of all that tiring fuss about carriages, when a good many of the visitors skipped into their vettura without tipping him. Round about Christmas, therefore, relations between the marchesa and her two principal dignitaries became far from harmonious; and a hail of orders and abuse would patter down on the backs of the old cameriere, crawling wearily up and downstairs with their hot-water-cans in their trembling hands, and of the young greenhorns of waiters, colliding with one another in their undisciplined zeal and smashing the plates. And it was only now, when the whole staff was put to work that people saw how old the cameriere were and how young the waiters and qualified as disgraceful and shocking the thrifty method of the marchesa in employing none but wrecks and infants in her service. The one muscular facchino, who was essential for hauling the luggage, cut an unexpected figure of virile maturity and robustness. But above everything the visitors detested the marchesa because of the great number of her servants, reflecting that now, at Christmas-time, they would have to tip every one of them. No, they never imagined that the staff was so large! Quite unnecessarily large too! Why couldn’t the marchesa engage a couple of strong young maids and waiters instead of all those old women and little boys? And there was much hushed plotting and confabulating in the corners of the passages and at meals, to decide on the tips to be given: they didn’t want to spoil the servants, but still they were staying all the winter; and therefore one lira was hardly enough and they hesitated between one lira twenty-five and one lira fifty. But, when they counted on their fingers that there were fully five-and-twenty servants and that therefore they were close on forty lire out of pocket, they thought it an awful lot and they got up subscription-lists. Two lists went round, one of one lira and one of twelve lire a visitor, the latter subscription covering the whole staff. On this second list some, who had arrived a month before and who had arranged to leave, entered their names for ten lire and some for six lire. Five lire was by general consent considered too little; and, when it became known that the grimy æsthetic ladies intended to give five lire, they were regarded with the greatest contempt.

It all meant a lot of trouble and excitement. As Christmas drew nearer, people streamed to the presepii set up by painters in the Palazzo Borghese: a panorama of Jerusalem and the shepherds, the angels, the Magi and Mary and the Child in the manger with the ox and the ass. They listened in the Ara Cœli to the preaching of little boys and girls, who by turns climbed the platform and told the story of the Nativity, some shyly reciting a little poem, prompted by an anxious mother; others, girls especially, declaiming and rolling their eyes with the dramatic fervour of little Italian actresses and ending up with a religious moral. The people and countless tourists stood and listened to the preaching; a pleasant spirit prevailed in the church, where the shrill young children’s voices were lifted up in oratory; there was laughter at a gesture or a point driven home; and the priests strolling round the church wore an unctuous smile because it was all so pretty and so satisfactory. And in the chapel of the Santo Bambino the miraculous wooden doll was bright with gold and jewels; and the close-packed multitude thronged to gaze at it.

All the visitors at Belloni’s bought bunches of holly in the Piazza di Spagna to adorn their rooms with; and some, such as the Baronin van Rothkirch, set up a private Christmas-tree in their own rooms. On the evening before the great party one and all went to admire these private trees, going in and out of one another’s rooms; and all the boarders wore a kind, festive smile and welcomed everybody, however much at other times they might quarrel and intrigue against one another. It was universally agreed that the Baronin had taken great pains and that her tree was magnificent. Her bedroom had been cleverly metamorphosed into a boudoir, the beds draped to look like divans, the wash-hand-stands concealed; and the tree was radiant with candles and tinsel. And the Baronin, a little sentimentally inclined, for the season reminded her of Berlin and her lost domesticity, opened her doors wide to everybody and was even offering the two æsthetic ladies sweets, when the marchesa, also smiling, appeared at the door, with her bosom moulded in sky-blue satin and with even larger crystals than usual in her ears. The room was full: there were the Van der Staals, Cornélie, Rudyard, Urania Hope and other guests going in and out, so that it became impossible to move and they stood packed together or sat on the draped beds of the mother and daughter. The marchesa led in beside her an unknown young man, short, slender, with a pale olive complexion and with dark, bright, witty, lively eyes. He wore dress-clothes and displayed the vague good manners of a beloved and careless viveur, distinguished and yet conceited. And she proudly went up to the Baronin, who kept prettily wiping her moist eyes, and with a certain arrogance presented:

“My nephew, Duca di San Stefano, Principe di Forte-Braccio....”

The well-known Italian name sounded from her lips in the small, crowded room with deliberate distinctness; and all eyes went to the young man, who bowed low before the Baronin and then looked round the room with a vague, ironical glance. The marchesa’s nephew had not yet been seen at the hotel that winter, but everybody knew that the young Duke of San Stefano, Prince of Forte-Braccio, was a nephew of the marchesa’s and one of the advertisements for her pension. And, while the prince talked to the Baronin and her daughter, Urania Hope stared at him as a miraculous being from another world. She clung tight to Cornélie’s arm, as though she were in danger of fainting at the sight of so much Italian nobility and greatness. She thought him very good-looking, very imposing, short and slender and pale, with his carbuncle eyes and his weary distinction and the white orchid in his button-hole. She would have loved to ask the marchioness to introduce her to her chic nephew, but she dared not, for she thought of her father’s stockinet-factory at Chicago.

The Christmas-tree party and the dance took place the following night. It became known that the marchesa’s nephew was coming that evening too; and a great excitement reigned throughout the day. The prince arrived after the presents had been taken down from the tree and distributed and made a sort of state entry by the side of his aunt, the marchesa, into the drawing-room, where the dancing had not yet begun, though the guests were sitting about the room, all fixing their eyes on the ducal and princely apparition.

Cornélie was strolling with Duco van der Staal, who to his mother’s and sisters’ great surprise had fished out his dress-clothes and appeared in the big hall; and they both observed the triumphant entry of la Belloni and her nephew and laughed at the fanatically upturned eyes of the English and American ladies. They, Cornélie and Duco, sat down in the hall on two chairs, in front of a clump of palms, which concealed one of the doors of the drawing-room, while the dance began inside. They were talking about the statues in the Vatican, which they had been to see two days before, when they heard, as though close to their ears, a voice which they recognized as the marchesa’s commanding organ, vainly striving to sink into a whisper. They looked round in surprise and perceived the hidden door, which was partly open, and through the open space they faintly distinguished the slim hand and black sleeve of the prince and a piece of the blue bosom of la Belloni, both seated on a sofa in the drawing-room. They were therefore back to back, separated by the half-open door. They listened for fun to the marchesa’s Italian; the prince’s answers were lisped so softly that they could scarcely catch them. And of what the marchesa said they heard only a few words and scraps of sentences. They were listening quite involuntarily, when they heard Rudyard’s name clearly pronounced by the marchesa.

“And who besides?” asked the prince, softly.

“An English miss,” said the marchesa. “Miss Taylor: she’s sitting over there, by herself in the corner. A simple little soul.... The Baronin and her daughter.... The Dutchwoman: a divorcée.... And the pretty American.”

“And those two very attractive Dutch girls?” asked the prince.

The music boom-boomed louder; and Cornélie and Duco did not catch the reply.

“And the divorced Dutchwoman?” the prince asked next.

“No money,” the marchesa answered, curtly.

“And the young baroness?”

“No money,” la Belloni repeated.

“So there’s no one except the stocking-merchant?” asked the prince, wearily.

La Belloni became cross, but Cornélie and Duco could not understand the sentences which she rattled out through the boom-booming music. Then, during a lull, they heard the marchesa say:

“She is very pretty. She has tons and tons of money. She could have gone to a first-class hotel but preferred to come here because, as a young girl travelling by herself, she was recommended to me and finds it pleasanter here. She has the big sitting-room to herself and pays fifty lire a day for her two rooms. She does not care about money. She pays three times as much as the others for her wood; and I also charge her for the wine.”

“She sells stockings,” muttered the prince, obstinately.

“Nonsense!” said the marchesa. “Remember that there’s nobody at the moment. Last winter we had rich English titled people, with a daughter, but you thought her too tall. You’re always discovering some objection. You mustn’t be so difficult.”

“I think those two little Dutch dolls attractive.”

“They have no money. You’re always thinking what you have no business to think.”

“How much did Papa promise you if you....”

The music boomed louder.

“ ... makes no difference.... If Rudyard talks to her.... Miss Taylor is easy.... Miss Hope....”

“I don’t want so many stockings as all that.”

“ ... very witty, I dare say.... If you don’t care to....”

“No.”

“ ... then I retire.... I’ll tell Rudyard so.... How much?”

“Sixty or seventy thousand: I don’t know exactly.”

“Are they urgent?”

“Debts are never urgent!”

“Do you agree?”

“Very well. But mind, I won’t sell myself for less than ten millions.... And then you get....”

They both laughed; and again the names of Rudyard and Urania were pronounced.

“Urania?” he asked.

“Yes, Urania,” replied la Belloni. “Those little Americans are very tactful. Look at the Comtesse de Castellane and the Duchess of Marlborough: how well they bear their husbands’ honours! They cut an excellent figure. They are mentioned in every society column and always with respect.”

“ ... All right then. I am tired of these wasted winters. But not less than ten millions.”

“Five.”

“No, ten.”

The prince and the marchesa had stood up to go. Cornélie looked at Duco. He laughed:

“I don’t quite understand them,” he said. “It’s a joke, of course.”

Cornélie was startled:

“A joke, you think, Mr. van der Staal?”

“Yes, they’re humbugging.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I do.”

“Have you any knowledge of human nature?”

“Oh, no, none at all!”

“I’m getting it, gradually. I believe that Rome can be dangerous and that an hotel-keeping marchesa, a prince and a Jesuit....”

“What about them?”

“Can be dangerous, if not to your sisters, because they have no money, but at any rate to Urania Hope.”

“I don’t believe it for a moment. It was all chaff. And it doesn’t interest me. What do you think of Praxiteles’ Eros? I think it the most divine statue that I ever saw. Oh, the Eros, the Eros! That is love, the real love, the predestined, fatal love, begging forgiveness for the suffering which it causes.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

“No. I have no knowledge of human nature and I have never been in love. You are always so definite. Dreams are beautiful, statues are delightful and poetry is everything. The Eros expresses love completely. The love of the Eros is so beautiful! I could never love so beautifully as that.... No, it does not interest me to understand human nature; and a dream of Praxiteles, lingering in a mutilated marble torso, is nobler than anything that the world calls love.”

She knitted her brows; her eyes were sombre.

“Let us go to the dancers,” she said. “We are so out of it all here.”

CHAPTER X

The day after the dance, at table, Cornélie received a strange impression: suddenly, as she sipped her delicious Genzano, ordered for her by Rudyard, she became aware that it was not by accident that she was sitting with the Baronin and her daughter, with Urania and Miss Taylor; she saw that the marchesa had an intention behind this arrangement. Rudyard, always civil, polite, thoughtful, always full of attentions, his pockets always filled with cards of introduction very difficult to obtain—or so at least he contended—talked without ceasing, lately more particularly to Miss Taylor, who went faithfully to hear all the best church music and always returned home in ecstasy. The pale, simple, thin little Englishwoman, who at first used to go into raptures over museums, ruins and the sunsets on the Aventine or the Monte Mario and who was always tired by her rambles through Rome, now devoted herself exclusively to the hundreds of churches, visited and studied them all and above all faithfully attended the musical services and spoke ecstatically of the choir in the Sistine Chapel and the quavering Glorias of the male soprani.

Cornélie spoke to Mrs. van der Staal and the Baronin von Rothkirch of the conversation between the marchesa and her nephew which she had heard through the half-open door; but neither of them, though interested and curious, took the marchesa’s words seriously, regarding them only as so much thoughtless talk between a foolish, match-making aunt and an unwilling nephew. Cornélie was struck by seeing how unable people are to take things seriously; but the Baronin was quite indifferent, saying that Rudyard could do her no harm and was still supplying her with tickets; and Mrs. van der Staal, who had been in Rome a long time and was accustomed to little boarding-house conspiracies, considered that Cornélie was making herself too uneasy about the fair Urania’s fate.

Suddenly, however, Miss Taylor disappeared from the table. They thought that she was ill, until it came to light that she had left the Pension Belloni. Rudyard said nothing; but, a few days later, the whole pension knew that Miss Taylor had been converted to the Catholic faith and had moved to a pension recommended by Rudyard, a pension frequented by monsignori and noted for its religious tone. Her disappearance produced a certain constraint in the conversation between Rudyard, the German ladies and Cornélie; and the latter, in the course of a week which the Baronin was spending at Naples, changed her seat and joined her fellow-countrywomen the Van der Staals. The Von Rothkirches also changed, because of the draught, said the Baronin; their seats were taken by new arrivals; and Urania was left alone with Rudyard at lunch and dinner, amid those foreign elements.

Cornélie reproached herself and one day spoke seriously to the American girl and warned her. But she dared not repeat what she had overheard at the dance; and her warning made no impression on Urania. And, when Rudyard had obtained for Miss Hope the privilege of a private audience of the Pope, Urania would not hear a word against Rudyard and considered him the kindest man whom she had ever met, Jesuit or no Jesuit.

But Rudyard continued to appear through a haze of mystery; and people were not agreed as to whether he was a priest or a layman.

CHAPTER XI

“What do those strangers matter to you?” asked Duco.

They were sitting in his studio: Mrs. van der Staal, Cornélie and the girls, Annie and Emilie. Annie was pouring out the tea; and they were discussing Miss Taylor and Urania.

“I am a stranger to you too!” said Cornélie.

“You are not a stranger to me, to us. But Miss Taylor and Urania don’t matter. Hundreds of shadows pass through our lives: I don’t see them and don’t feel for them.”

“And am I not a shadow?”

“I have talked to you too much in the Borghese and on the Palatine to look upon you as a shadow.”

“Rudyard is a dangerous shadow,” said Annie.

“He has no hold over us,” Duco replied.

Mrs. van der Staal looked at Cornélie. She understood the enquiring glance and said, laughing:

“No, he has no hold over me either. Still, if I felt the need of a religion, I mean an ecclesiastical religion, I would rather be a Roman Catholic than a Protestant. But, as things are ...”

She did not complete her sentence. She felt safe in this studio, in this soft, many-coloured profusion of beautiful things, in the affection of her friends; she felt in harmony with them all: with the worldly charm of that somewhat superficial mother and her two pretty girls, a little doll-like and vaguely cosmopolitan and a trifle vain of the little marquises with whom they danced and bicycled; and with that son, that brother so very different from the three of them and yet obviously related to them, as a movement, a gesture, a single word would show. It also struck Cornélie that they accepted each other affectionately as they were: Duco, his mother and sisters, with their stories about the Princesses Colonna and Odescalchi; mevrouw and the girls and him, with his worn jacket and his unkempt hair. And, when he began to speak, especially about Rome, when he put his dream into words, in almost bookish sentences, which however flowed easily and naturally from his lips, Cornélie felt in harmony with her surroundings, secure and interested and to some extent lost that longing to contradict him which his artistic indolence sometimes aroused in her. And, besides, his indolence suddenly seemed to her merely apparent and perhaps an affection, for he showed her sketches and water-colour drawings, not one of them finished, but every water-colour alive with light before all things, alive with all that light of Italy: the pearl sunsets over the molten emerald of Venice; the campanili of Florence drawn vaguely and dreamily against tender tea-rose skies; Siena fortress-like, blue-black in the bluish moonlight; the blazing sunshine behind St. Peter’s; and, above all, the ruins, in every kind of light: the Forum in the bright sunlight, the Palatine by twilight, the Colosseum mysterious in the night; and then the Campagna: all the dream-like skies and luminous haze of the glad and sad Campagna, with pale-pink mauves, dewy blues, dusky violets or the swaggering ochres of pyrotechnical sunsets and clouds flaring like the crimson pinions of the phœnix. And, when Cornélie asked him why nothing was finished off, he answered that nothing was right. He saw the skies as dreams, visions and apotheoses; and on his paper they became water and paint; and paint was not a thing to be finished off. Besides, he lacked the self-confidence. And then he laid his skies aside, he said, and sat down to copy Byzantine madonnas.

When he saw that his water-colours interested her nevertheless, he went on talking about himself: how he had at first raved over the noble and ingenuous Primitives, Giotto and especially Lippo Memmi; how, after that, spending a year in Paris, he had found nothing that excelled Forain: cold, dry satire in two or three lines; how, next, in the Louvre, Rubens had become revealed to him, Rubens whose own talent and whose own brush he used to trace amid all the prentice-work and imitations of his pupils, until he was able to tell which cherub was by Rubens himself in a sky full of cherubs painted by four or five disciples.

And then, he said, he would pass weeks without giving a thought to painting or taking up a brush and would go daily to the Vatican, lost in contemplation of the magnificent marbles.

Once he had sat dreaming a whole morning in front of the Eros; once he had dreamt a poem there, to a very gentle, melodious, monotonous accompaniment, like an inward incantation. On coming home he had tried to put both poem and music on paper, but he had failed. Now he could no longer look at Forain, thought Rubens coarse and disgusting, but remained faithful to the Primitives:

“And suppose for a moment that I painted a lot and sent a lot of pictures to exhibitions? Should I be any the happier? Should I feel satisfied in having done something? I doubt it. Sometimes I do finish a water-colour and sell it; and then I can go on living for a month without troubling Mamma. Money I don’t care about. Ambition is quite foreign to my nature.... But don’t let us talk about myself. Do you still think of the future and ... bread?”

“Perhaps,” she said, with a melancholy laugh, while the studio around her grew dusk and dim and the figures of his mother and sisters, sitting silent, languid and uninterested in their easy-chairs, gradually faded away and every colour slowly paled. “But I am so weak-minded. You say that you are not an artist; and I ... I am not an apostle.”

“To give one’s life a course: that is the difficulty. Every life has a line, an appointed course, a road, a path: life has to flow along that line to death and what comes after death; and that line is difficult to find. I shall never find my line.”

“I don’t see my line before me either.”

“Do you know, a restlessness has come over me. Mamma, listen, a restlessness has come over me. I used to dream in the Forum, I was happy and didn’t think about my line, my appointed course. Mamma, do you think about your line? Do you, girls?”

His sisters giggled in the dark, sunk in their low chairs, like two pussy-cats. Mamma got up:

“Duco dear, you know I can’t follow you. I admire Cornélie for liking your water-colours and understanding what you mean by that line. My line is to go home at once, for it’s very late.”

“That’s the line of the next two seconds. But there is a restlessness about my line that affects it for days and weeks to come. I am not leading the right life. The past is very beautiful and so peaceful, because it has been. But I have lost that peace. The present is very small. But the future! ... Oh, if we could only find an aim ... for the future!”

They no longer listened; they went down the dark stairs, groping their way.

“Bread?” he asked himself, wonderingly.

CHAPTER XII

One morning when Cornélie stayed indoors she went through the books that lay scattered about her room. And she found that it was useless for her to read Ovid, in order to study something of Roman manners, some of which had alarmed and shocked her; she found that Dante and Petrarch were too difficult to learn Italian from, whereas she had only to pick up a word or two in order to make herself understood in a shop or by the servants; she found Hare’s Walks a too wearisome guide, because every cobble-stone in Rome did not inspire her with the same interest that Hare evidently derived from it. Then she confessed to herself that she could never see Italy and Rome as Duco van der Staal did. She never saw the light of the skies or the drifting of the clouds as he had seen them in his unfinished water-colour sketches. She had never seen the ruins transfigured in glory as he did in his hours of dreaming on the Palatine or in the Forum. She saw a picture merely with a layman’s eye; a Byzantine madonna made no appeal to her. She was very fond of statues; but to fall head over ears in love with a mutilated marble torso, in the spirit in which he loved the Eros, seemed to her sickly ... and yet it seemed to be the right spirit in which to see the Eros. Well, not sickly, she admitted ... but morbid: the word, though she herself smiled at it expressed her opinion better; not sickly, but morbid. And she looked upon an olive as a tree rather like a willow, whereas Duco had told her that an olive was the most beautiful tree in the world.

She did not agree with him, either about the olive or about the Eros; and yet she felt that he was right from a certain mysterious standpoint on which there was no room for her, because it was like a mystic eminence amid impassable sensitive spheres which were not hers, even as the eminence was to her an unknown vantage-point of sensitiveness and vision. She did not agree with him and yet she was convinced of his greater rightness, his truer view, his nobler insight, his deeper feeling; and she was certain that her way of seeing Italy, in the disappointment of her disillusion, in the grey light of a growing indifference, was neither noble nor good; and she knew that the beauty of Italy escaped her, whereas to him it was like a tangible and comprehensible vision. And she cleared away Ovid and Petrarch and Hare’s guidebook and locked them up in her trunk and took out the novels and pamphlets which had appeared that year about the woman movement in Holland. She took an interest in the problem and thought that it made her more modern than Duco, who suddenly seemed to her to belong to a bygone age, not modern, not modern. She repeated the words with enjoyment and suddenly felt herself stronger. To be modern: that should be her strength. One phrase of Duco’s had struck her immensely, that exclamation:

“Oh, if we could only find an aim! Our life has a line, a path, which it must follow....”

To be modern: was that not a line? To find the solution of a modern problem: was that not an aim in life? He was quite right, from his point of view, from which he saw Italy; but was not the whole of Italy a past, a dream, at least that Italy which Duco saw, a dreamy paradise of nothing but art? It could not be right to stand like that, see like that a dream like that. The present was here: on the grey horizon muttered an approaching storm; and the latter-day problems flashed like lightning. Was that not what she had to live for? She felt for the woman, she felt for the girl: she herself had been the girl, brought up only as a social ornament, to shine, to be pretty and attractive and then of course to get married; she had shone and she had married; and now she was three-and-twenty, divorced from the husband who at one time had been her only aim and, for her sake, the aim of her parents; now she was alone, astray, desperate and utterly disconsolate: she had nothing to cling to and she suffered. She still loved him, cad and scoundrel though he was; and she had thought that she was doing something very clever, when she went abroad, to Italy, to study art. But she did not understand art, she did not feel Italy. Oh, how clearly she saw it, after those talks with Duco, that she would never understand art, even though she used to sketch a bit, even though she used to have a biscuit-group after Canova in her boudoir, Cupid and Psyche: so nice for a young girl! And with what certainty she now knew that she would never grasp Italy, because she did not think an olive-tree so very beautiful and had never seen the sky of the Campagna as a fluttering phœnix-wing! No, Italy would never be the consolation of her life....

But what then? She had been through much, but she was alive and very young. And once again, at the sight of those pamphlets, at the sight of that novel, the desire arose in her soul: to be modern, to be modern! And to take part in the problem of to-day! To live for the future! To live for her fellow-women, married or unmarried!...

She dared not look deep down into herself, lest she should waver. To live for the future!... It separated her a little more from Duco, that new ideal. Did she mind? Was she in love with him? No, she thought not. She had been in love with her husband and did not want to fall in love at once with the first agreeable young man whom she chanced to meet in Rome....

And she read the pamphlets, about the feminine problem and love. Then she thought of her husband, then of Duco. And wearily she dropped the pamphlets and reflected how sad it all was: people, women, girls. She, a woman, a young woman, an aimless woman: how sad her life was! And Duco: he was happy. And yet he was seeking the line of his life, yet he was looking out for his aim. A new restlessness had entered into him. And she wept a little and anxiously twisted herself on her cushions and clasped her hands and prayed, unconsciously, without knowing to whom she was praying:

“O God, tell me what to do!”

CHAPTER XIII

It was then, after a few days, that Cornélie conceived the idea of leaving the boarding-house and going to live in rooms. The hotel-life disturbed her budding thoughts, like a wind of vanity that was constantly blighting very vague and fragile blossoms; and, despite a torrent of abuse from the marchesa, who reproached her with having engaged to stay the whole winter, she moved into the rooms which she had found with Duco van der Staal, after much hunting and stair-climbing. They were in the Via dei Serpenti, up any number of stairs: a set of two roomy, but almost entirely unfurnished apartments, containing only the absolute essentials; and, though the view extended far and wide above the house-tops of Rome to the circular ruin of the Colosseum, the rooms were rough and uncomfortable, bare and uninviting. Duco had not approved of them and said that they made him shiver, although they faced the sun; but there was something about the ruggedness of the place that harmonized with Cornélie’s new mood.

When they parted that day, he thought how inartistic she was and she how unmodern he was. They did not meet again for several days; and Cornélie was very lonely, but did not feel her loneliness, because she was writing a pamphlet on the social position of divorced women. The idea was suggested to her by a few sentences in a tract on the feminist problem; and at once, without wasting much time in thought, she flung off her sentences in a succession of impulses and intuitions, rough-hewn, cold and clear; she wrote in an epistolary style, without literary art, as though to warn girls against cherishing too many illusions about marriage.

She had not made her rooms comfortable; she sat there, high up over Rome, with her view across the house-tops to the Colosseum, writing, writing and writing, absorbed in her sorrow, uttering herself in her stubborn sentences, feeling intensely bitter, but pouring the wormwood of her soul into her pamphlet. Mrs. van der Staal and the girls, who came to see her, were surprised by her untidy appearance, her rough-looking rooms, with a dying fire in the little grate and with no flowers, no books, no tea and no cushions; and, when they went away after fifteen minutes, pleading urgent errands, they looked at each other, tripping down the endless stairs, with eyes of amazement, utterly at a loss to understand this transformation of an interesting, elegant little woman, surrounded by an aura of poetry and a tragic past, into an “independent woman,” working furiously at a pamphlet full of bitter invective against society. And, when Duco looked her up again in a week’s time and came to sit with her a little, he remained silent, stiff and upright in his chair, without speaking, while Cornélie read the beginning of her pamphlet to him. He was touched by the glimpses which it revealed to him of personal suffering and experience, but he was irritated by a certain discord between that slender, lily-like woman, with her drooping movements, and the surroundings in which she now felt at her ease, entirely absorbed in her hatred for the society—Hague society—which had become hostile to her because she refused to go on living with a cad who ill-treated her. And while she was reading, Duco thought:

“She would not write like that if she were not writing it all down from her own suffering. Why doesn’t she make a novel of it? Why generalize from one’s personal sorrows and why that admonishing voice?...”

He did not like it. He thought the sound of that voice was hard, those truths so personal, that bitterness unattractive and that hatred of convention so small. And, when she put a question to him, he did not say much, nodded his head in vague approval and remained sitting in his stiff, uncomfortable attitude. He did not know what to answer, he was unable to admire, he thought her inartistic. And yet a great compassion welled up within him when he saw, in spite of it all, how charming she would be and what charm and womanly dignity would be hers could she find the line of her life and moved harmoniously along that line with the music of her own movement. He now saw her taking a wrong road, a path pointed out to her by the fingers of others and not entered upon from the impulse of her own soul. And he felt the deepest pity for her. He, an artist, but above all a dreamer, sometimes saw vividly, despite his dreaming, despite his sometimes all-embracing love of line and colour and atmosphere; he, the artist and dreamer, sometimes very clearly saw the emotion looming through the outward actions of his fellow-creatures, saw it like light shining through alabaster; and he suddenly saw her lost, seeking, straying: seeking she herself knew not what, straying she herself knew not through what labyrinth, far from her line, the line of her life and the course of her soul’s journey, which she had never yet found.

She sat before him excitedly. She had read her last pages with a flushed face, in a resonant voice, her whole being in a fever. She looked as if she would have liked to fling those bitter pages at the feet of her Dutch sisters, at the feet of all women. He, absorbed in his speculations, melancholy in his pity for her, had scarcely listened, nodding his head in vague approval. And suddenly she began to speak of herself, revealed herself wholly, told him her life: her existence as a young girl at the Hague, her education with a view to shining a little and being attractive and pretty, with not one serious glance at her future, only waiting for a good match, with a flirtation here and a little love-affair there, until she was married: a good match, in her own circle; her husband a first lieutenant of hussars, a fine, handsome fellow, of a good, distinguished family, with a little money. She had fallen in love with him for his handsome face and his fine figure, which his uniform showed to advantage, and he with her as he might have done with any other girl who had a pretty face. Then came the revelation of those very early days: the discord between their characters manifesting itself luridly at once. She, spoilt at home, dainty, delicate, fastidious, but selfishly fastidious and flying out against any offence to her own spoilt little ego; he no longer the lover but immediately and brutally the man with rights to this and rights to that, with an oath here and a roar there; she with neither the tact nor the patience to make of their foundering lives what could still be made of them, nervous, quick-tempered, quick to resent coarseness, which made his savagery flare up so violently that he ill-treated her, swore at her, struck her, shook her and banged her against the wall.

The divorce followed. He had not consented at first, content, in spite of all, to have a house and in that house a wife, female to him, the male, and declining to return to the discomfort of life in chambers, until she simply ran away, first to her parents, then to friends in the country, protesting loudly against the law, which was so unjust to women. He had yielded at last and allowed himself to be accused of infidelity, which was not beside the truth. She was now free, but stood as it were alone, looked at askance by all her acquaintances, refusing to yield to their conventional demand for that sort of half-mourning which, according to their conventional ideas, should surround a divorced woman and at once returning to her former life, the gay life of an unmarried girl. But she had felt that this could not go on, both because of her acquaintances and because of herself: her acquaintances looking at her askance and she loathing her acquaintances, loathing their parties and dinners, until she felt profoundly unhappy, lonely and forlorn, without anything or anybody to cling to, and had felt all the depression that weighs down on the divorced woman. Sometimes, in her heart of hearts, she reflected that by dint of great patience and great tact she might have managed that man, that he was not wicked, only coarse, that she was still fond of him, or at least of his handsome face and his sturdy figure. Love, no, it was not love; but had she ever thought of love as she now sometimes pictured it? And did not nearly everybody live more or less so-so, with a good deal of give and take?

But this regret she hardly confessed to herself, did not now confess to Duco; and what she did confess was her bitterness, her hatred of her husband, of marriage, of convention, of people, of the world, of all the great generalities, generalizing her own feelings into one great curse against life. He listened to her, with pity. He felt that there was something noble in her, which, however, had been stifled from the beginning. He forgave her for not being artistic, but he was sorry that she had never found herself, that she did not know what she was, who she was, what her life should be, or where the line of her life wound, the only path which she ought to tread, as every life follows one path. Oh, how often, if a person would but let herself go, like a flower, like a bird, like a cloud, like a star which so obediently ran its course, she would find her happiness and her life, even as the flower or the bird finds them, even as the cloud drifts before the sun, even as the star follows its course through the heavens. But he told her nothing of his thoughts, knowing that, especially in her present mood of bitterness, she would not understand them and could derive no comfort from them, because they would be too vague for her and too far removed from her own manner of thinking. She thought of herself, but imagined that she was thinking of women and girls and their movement towards the future. The lines of the women ... but had not every woman a line of her own? Only, how few of them knew it: their direction, their path, their line of life, their wavering course in the twilight of the future. And perhaps, because they did not know it for themselves, they were now all seeking together a broad path, a main road, along which they would march in troops, in a threatening multitude of women, in regiments of women, with banners and mottoes and war-cries, a broad path, parallel with the movement of the men, until the two paths would melt into one, until the troops of women would mingle with the troops of men, with equal rights and equal fullness of life....

He said nothing to her. She noticed his silence and did not see how much was going on within him, how earnestly he was thinking of her, how profoundly he pitied her. She thought that she had bored him. And suddenly, around her, she saw the dim, barren room, saw that the fire was out; and her zeal subsided, her fever cooled and she thought her pamphlet bad, lacking strength and conviction. What would she not have given for a word from him! But he sat silent, seemed to take no interest, probably did not admire her style of writing. And she felt sad, deserted, lonely, estranged from him and bitter because of the estrangement; she felt ready to weep, to sob; and, strange to say, in her bitterness she thought of him, of her husband, with his handsome face. She could not restrain herself, she wept. Duco came up to her, put his hand on her shoulder. Then she felt something of what was going on within him and that his silence was not due to coldness. She told him that she could not remain alone that evening: she was too wretched, too wretched. He comforted her, said that there was much that was good, much that was true in her pamphlet; that he was not a good judge of these modern questions; that he was never clever except when he talked about Italy; that he felt so little for people and so much for statues, so little for what was newly building for a coming century and so much for what lay in ruins and remained over from earlier centuries. He said it as though apologizing. She smiled through her tears but repeated that she could not stay alone that evening and that she was coming with him to Belloni’s, to his mother and sisters. And they went together, they walked round together; and, to divert her mind, he spoke to her of his own thoughts, told her anecdotes of the Renascence masters. She did not hear what he said, but his voice was sweet to her ears. There was something so gentle about his indifference to the modern things that interested her, he had so much calmness, healing as balsam, in the restfulness of his soul, which allowed itself to move along the golden thread of his dreams, as though that thread was the line of his life, so much calmness and gentleness that she too grew calmer and gentler and looked up to him with a smile.

And, however far removed they might be from each other—he going along a dreamy path, she lost in an obscure maze—they nevertheless felt each other approaching, felt their souls drawing nearer to each other, while their bodies moved beside each other in the actual street, through Rome, in the evening. He put his arm through hers to guide her steps.

And, when they came in sight of Belloni’s, she thanked him, she did not know exactly for what: for the look in his eyes, for his voice, for the walk, for the consolation which she felt inexplicably yet clearly radiating from him; and she was glad to have come with him this evening and to feel the distraction of the Belloni table-d’hôte around her.

But at night, alone, alone in her bare rooms, she was overcome by her wretchedness as by a sea of blackness; and, looking out at the Colosseum, which showed faintly as a black arc in the black night, she sobbed until she felt herself sinking to the point of death, derelict, lonely and forlorn, high up above Rome, above the roofs, above the pale lights of Rome by night, under the clouds of the black night, sinking and derelict, as though she were drifting, a shipwrecked waif on an ocean which drowned the world and roared its plaints to the inexorable heavens.

CHAPTER XIV

Nevertheless Cornélie recovered her calmness when her pamphlet was finished. She unpacked her trunks, arranged her rooms a little more snugly and, now more at her ease, rewrote the pamphlet and, in the revision, improved her style and even her ideas. When she had done working in the morning, she usually lunched at a small osteria, where she nearly always met Duco van der Staal and had her meal with him at a little table. As a rule she dined at Belloni’s, beside the Van der Staals, in order to obtain a little diversion. The marchesa had not bowed to her at first, though she suffered her to attend her table-d’hôte, at three lire an evening; but after a time she bowed to Cornélie again, with a bitter-sweet little smile, for she had relet her two rooms at a higher price. And Cornélie, in her calmer mood, found it pleasant to change in the evening, to see Mrs. van der Staal and the girls, to listen to their little stories about the Roman salons and to cast a glance over the long tables. And they saw that the guests were ever again different, as in a kaleidoscope of fleeting personalities. Rudyard had disappeared, owing money to the marchesa, no one knew whither; the Von Rothkirches had gone to Greece; but Urania Hope was still there and sat next to the Marchesa Belloni. On her other side was the nephew, the Prince of Forte-Braccio, Duke of San Stefano, who dined at Belloni’s every night. And Cornélie saw that a sort of conspiracy was in progress, the marchesa and the prince laying siege to the vain little American from either side. And next day she saw two monsignori seated in eager conversation with Urania at the marchesa’s table, while the marchesa and the prince nodded their heads. All the visitors commented on it, every eye was turned in that direction, everybody watched the manœuvres and delighted in the romance.

Cornélie was the only one who was not amused. She would have liked to warn Urania against the marchesa, the prince and the monsignori who had taken Rudyard’s place, but especially against marriage, even marriage with a prince and duke. And, growing excited, she spoke to Mrs. van der Staal and the girls, repeated phrases out of her pamphlet, glowing with her red young hatred against society and people and the world.

Dinner was over; and, still eagerly talking, she went with the Van der Staals—mevrouw and the girls and Duco—to the drawing-room, sat down in a corner, resumed her conversation, flew out at mevrouw, who had contradicted her, and then suddenly saw a fat lady—the girls had already nick-named her the Satin Frigate—come towards her with a smile and say, while still at some distance:

“I beg your pardon, but there’s something I want to say. Look here, I have been to Belloni’s regularly every winter for the last ten years, from November to Easter; and every evening after dinner—but only after dinner—I sit in this corner, at this table, on this sofa. I hope you won’t mind, but I should be glad to have my own seat now.”

And the Satin Frigate smiled amiably; but, when the Van der Staals and Cornélie rose in mute amazement, she dumped herself down with a rustle on the sofa, bobbed up and down for a moment on the springs, laid her crochet-work on the table with a gesture as though she were planting the Union Jack in a new colony and said, with her most amiable smile:

“Very much obliged. So many thanks.”

Duco roared, the girls giggled, but the Satin Frigate merely nodded to them good-humouredly. And, not even yet realizing what had happened, astounded but gay, they sat down in another corner, the girls still seized with an irrepressible giggle. The two æsthetic ladies, with the evening-dress and the Jaegers, who sat reading at the table in the middle of the room, closed their two books with one slam, rose and indignantly went away, because people were laughing and talking in the drawing-room:

“It’s a shame!” they said, aloud.

And, angular, arrogant and grimy, they stalked out through the door.

“What strange people!” thought Duco, smiling. “Shadows of people!... Their lines curl like arabesque through ours. Why do they cross our lines with their petty movements and why are ours never crossed by those which perhaps would be dearest to our souls?...”

He always took Cornélie back to the Via dei Serpenti. They walked slowly through the silent, deserted streets. Sometimes it was late in the evening, but sometimes it was immediately after dinner and then they would go through the Corso and he would generally ask her to come and sit at Aragno’s for a little. She agreed and they drank their coffee amid the gaiety of the brightly-lit café, watching the bustle on the pavement outside. They exchanged few words, distracted by the passers-by and the visitors to the café; but they both enjoyed this moment and felt at one with each other. Duco evidently did not give a thought to the unconventionality of their behaviour; but Cornélie thought of Mrs. van der Staal and that she would not approve of it or consent to it in one of her daughters, to sit alone with a gentleman in a café in the evening. And Cornélie also remembered the Hague and smiled at the thought of her Hague friends. And she looked at Duco, who sat quietly, pleased to be sitting with her, and drank his coffee and spoke a word now and again or pointed to a queer type or a pretty woman passing....

One evening, after dinner, he suggested that they should all go to the ruins. It was full moon, a wonderful sight. But mevrouw was afraid of malaria, the girls of foot-pads; and Duco and Cornélie went by themselves. The streets were quite empty, the Colosseum rose menacingly like a fortress in the night; but they went in and the moonlight blue of the night shone through the open arches: the round pit of the arena was black on one side with shadow, while the stream of moonlight poured in on the other side, like a white flood, like a cascade; and it was as though the night were haunted, as though the Colosseum were haunted by all the dead past of Rome, emperors, gladiators and martyrs; shadows prowled like lurking wild animals, a patch of light suggested a naked woman and the galleries seemed to rustle with the sound of the multitude. And yet there was nothing and Duco and Cornélie were alone, in the depths of the huge, colossal ruin, half in shadow and half in light; and, though she was not afraid, she was obsessed by that awful haunting of the past and pushed closer to him and clutched his arm and felt very, very small. He just pressed her hand, with his simple ease of manner, to reassure her. And the night oppressed her, the ghostliness of it all suffocated her, the moon seemed to whirl giddily in the sky and to expand to a gigantic size and spin round like a silver wheel. He said nothing, he was in one of his dreams, seeing the past before him. And silently they went away and he led her through the Arch of Titus into the Forum. On the left rose the ruins of the imperial palaces; and all around them stood the black fragments, with a few pillars soaring on high and the white moonlight pouring down like a ghostly sea out of the night. They met no one, but she was frightened and clung tighter to his arm. When they sat down for a moment on a fragment of the foundation of some ancient building, she shivered with cold. He started up, said that she must be careful not to catch a chill; and they walked on and left the Forum. He took her home and she went upstairs alone, striking a match to see her way up the dark staircase. Once in her room, she perceived that it was dangerous to wander about the ruins at night. She reflected how little Duco had spoken, not thinking of danger, lost in his nocturnal dream, peering into the awful ghostliness. Why ... why had he not gone alone? Why had he asked her to go with him? She fell asleep after a chaos of whirling thoughts: the prince and Urania, the fat satin lady, the Colosseum and the martyrs and Duco and Mrs. van der Staal. His mother was so ordinary, his sisters charming but commonplace and he ... so strange! So simple, so unaffected, so unreserved; and for that very reason so strange. He would be impossible at the Hague, among her friends. And she smiled as she thought of what he had said and how he had said it and how he could sit quietly silent, for minutes on end, with a smile about his lips, as though thinking of something beautiful....

But she must warn Urania....

And she wearily fell asleep.

CHAPTER XV

Cornélie’s premonition regarding Mrs. van der Staal’s opinion of her intercourse with Duco was confirmed: mevrouw spoke to her seriously, saying that she would compromise herself if she went on like that and adding that she had spoken to Duco in the same sense. But Cornélie answered rather haughtily and nonchalantly, declared that, after always minding the conventions and becoming very unhappy in spite of it, she had resolved to mind them no longer, that she valued Duco’s conversation and that she was not going to be deprived of it because of what people thought or said. And then, she asked Mrs. van der Staal, who were “people?” Their three or four acquaintances at Belloni’s? Who knew her besides? Where else did she go? Why should she care about the Hague? And she gave a scornful laugh, loftily parrying Mrs. van der Staal’s arguments.

The conversation caused a coolness between them. Wounded in her touchy over-sensitiveness, she did not come to dinner at Belloni’s that evening. Next day, meeting Duco at their little table in the osteria, she asked him what he thought of his mother’s rebuke. He smiled vaguely, raising his eyebrows, obviously not realizing the commonplace truth of his mother’s words, saying that those were just Mamma’s ideas, which of course were all very well and current in the set in which Mamma and his sisters lived, but which he didn’t enter into or bother about, unless Cornélie thought that Mamma was right. And Cornélie blazed out contemptuously, shrugged her shoulders, asked who or what there was for whose sake she should allow herself to break off their friendly intercourse. They ordered a mezzo-fiasco between them and had a long, chatty lunch like two comrades, like two students. He said that he had been thinking over her pamphlet; he talked, to please her, about the modern woman, modern marriage, the modern girl. She condemned the way in which Mrs. van der Staal was bringing up her daughters, that light, frivolous education and that endless going about, on the look for a husband. She said that she spoke from experience.

They walked along the Via Appia that afternoon and went to the Catacombs, where a Trappist showed them round. When Cornélie returned home she felt pleasantly light and cheerful. She did not go out again; she piled up the logs on her fire against the evening, which was turning chilly, and supped off a little bread and jelly, so as not to go out for her dinner. Sitting in her tea-gown, with her hands folded over her head, she stared into the briskly burning logs and let the evening speed past her. She was satisfied with her life, so free, independent of everything and everybody. She had a little money, she could go on living like this. She had no great needs. Her life in rooms, in little restaurants was not expensive. She wanted no clothes. She felt satisfied. Duco was an agreeable friend: how lonely she would be without him! Only her life must acquire some aim. What aim? The feminist movement? But how, abroad? It was such a different movement to work at.... She would send her pamphlet now to a newly founded women’s paper. But then? She wasn’t in Holland and she didn’t want to go to Holland; and yet there would certainly be more scope there for her activity, for exchanging views with others. Whereas here, in Rome.... An indolence overcame her, in the drowsiness of her cosy room. For Duco had helped her to arrange her sitting-room. He certainly was a cultivated fellow, even though he was not modern. What a lot he knew about history, about Italy; and how cleverly he told it all! The way he explained Italy to her, she was interested in the country after all.

Only, he wasn’t modern. He had no insight into Italian politics, into the struggle between the Quirinal and the Vatican, into anarchism, which was showing its head at Milan, into the riots in Sicily.... An aim in life: what a difficult thing it was! And, in her evening drowsiness after a pleasant day, she did not feel the absence of an aim and enjoyed the soft luxury of letting her thoughts glide on in unison with the drowsy evening hours, in a voluptuous self-indulgence. She looked at the sheets of her pamphlet, scattered over her big writing-table, a real table to work at: they lay yellow under the light of her reading-lamp; they had not all been recopied, but she was not in the mood now; she threw a log into the little grate and the fire smoked and blazed. So pleasant, that foreign habit of burning wood instead of coal....

And she thought of her husband. She missed him sometimes. Could she not have managed him, with a little tact and patience? After all, he was very nice during the period of their engagement. He was rough, but not bad. He might have sworn at her sometimes, but perhaps he did not mean any great harm. He waltzed divinely, he swung you round so firmly.... He was good-looking and, she had to confess, she was in love with him, if only for his handsome face, his handsome figure. There was something about his eyes and mouth that she was never able to resist. When he spoke, she had to look at his mouth. However, that was all over and done with....

After all, perhaps the life at the Hague was too monotonous for her temperament. She liked travelling, seeing new people, developing new ideas; and she had never been able to settle down in her little set. And now she was free, independent of all ties, of all people. If Mrs. van der Staal was angry, she didn’t care.... And, all the same, Duco was rather modern, in his indifference to convention. Or was it merely the artistic side in him? Or was he, as a man who was not modern, indifferent to it even as she, a modern woman, was? A man could allow himself more. A man was not so easily compromised.... A modern woman. She repeated the words proudly. Her drowsiness acquired a certain arrogance. She drew herself up, stretching out her arms, looked at herself in the glass: her slender figure, her delicate little face, a trifle pale, with the eyes big and grey and bright under their remarkably long lashes, her light-brown hair in a loose, tangled coil, the lines of her figure, like those of a drooping lily, very winsome in the creased folds of her old tea-gown, pale-pink and faded.... What was her path in life? She felt herself to be something more than a worker and fighter, to be very complex, felt that she was a woman too, felt a great womanliness inside her, like a weakness which would hamper her energy. And she wandered through the room, unable to decide to go to bed, and, staring into the gloomy ashes of the expiring fire, she thought of her future, of what she would become and how, of how she would go and whither, along which curve of life, wandering through what forests, winding through what alleys, crossing which other curves of which other, seeking souls....

CHAPTER XVI

The idea had long fixed itself in Cornélie’s mind that she must speak to Urania Hope; and one morning she sent her a note asking for an appointment that afternoon. Miss Hope wrote back assenting; and at five o’clock Cornélie found her at home in her handsome and expensive sitting-room at Belloni’s: many lights, many flowers; Urania hammering on the piano in an indoor gown of Venetian lace; the table decked with a rich tea, with cut bread-and-butter, cakes and sweets. Cornélie had said that she wanted to see Miss Hope alone, on a matter of importance, and at once asked if she would be alone, feeling a doubt of it, now that Urania was receiving her so formally. But Urania reassured her: she had said that she was at home to no one but Mrs. de Retz and was very curious to know what Cornélie had come to talk about. Cornélie reminded Urania of her former warning and, when Urania laughed, she took her hand and looked at her with such serious eyes that she made an impression of the American girl’s frivolous nature and Urania became puzzled. Urania now suddenly thought it very momentous—a secret, an intrigue, a danger, in Rome!—and they whispered together. And Cornélie, no longer feeling anxious amid this increasing intimacy, confessed to Urania what she had heard through the half-open door: the marchesa’s machinations with her nephew, whom she was absolutely bent on marrying to a rich heiress at the behest of the prince’s father, who seemed to have promised her so much for putting the match through. Then she spoke of Miss Taylor’s conversion, effected by Rudyard: Rudyard, who did not seem able to achieve his purpose with Urania, failing to obtain a hold on her confiding, but frivolous, butterfly nature, and who, as Cornélie suspected, had for that reason incurred the disfavour of his ecclesiastical superiors and vanished without settling his debt to the marchesa. His place appeared to have been taken by the two monsignori, who looked more dignified and worldly and displayed great unctuousness, were more lavish in smiles. And Urania, staring at this danger, at these pit-falls under her feet which Cornélie had suddenly revealed to her, now became really frightened, turned pale and promised to be on her guard. Really she would have liked to tell her maid to pack up at once, so that they might leave Rome as soon as possible, for another town, another pension, one with lots of titled people: she adored titles! And Cornélie, seeing that she had made an impression, continued, spoke of herself, spoke of marriage in general, said that she had written a pamphlet against marriage and on The Social Position of Divorced Women. And she spoke of the suffering which she had been through and of the feminist movement in Holland. And, once in the vein, she abandoned all restraint and talked more and more emphatically, until Urania thought her exceedingly clever, a very clever girl, to be able to argue and write like that on a ques-tion brû-lante, laying a fine stress on the first syllables of the French words. She admitted that she would like to have the vote and, as she said this, spread out the long train of her lace tea-gown. Cornélie spoke of the injustice of the law which leaves the wife nothing, takes everything from her and forces her entirely into the husband’s power; and Urania agreed with her and passed the little dish of chocolate-creams. And to the accompaniment of a second cup of tea they talked excitedly, both speaking at once, neither listening to what the other was saying; and Urania said that it was a shame. From the general discussion they relapsed to the consideration of their particular interests: Cornélie depicted the character of her husband, unable, in the coarseness of his nature, to understand a woman or to consent that a woman should stand beside him and not beneath him. And she once more returned to the Jesuits, to the danger of Rome for rich girls travelling alone, to that virago of a marchesa and to the prince, that titled bait which the Jesuits flung to win a soul and to improve the finances of an impoverished Italian house which had remained faithful to the Pope and refused to serve the king. And both of them were so vehement and excited that they did not hear the knock and looked up only when the door slowly opened. They started, glanced round and both turned pale when they saw the Prince of Forte-Braccio enter the room. He apologized with a smile, said that he had seen a light in Miss Urania’s sitting-room, that the porter had told him she was engaged, but that he had ventured to disobey her orders. And he sat down; and, in spite of all that they had been saying, Urania thought it delightful to have the prince sitting there and accepting a cup of tea at her hands and graciously consenting to eat a piece of cake.

And Urania showed her album of coats of arms—the prince had already contributed an impression of his—and next the album with patterns of the queen’s ball-dresses. Then the prince laughed and felt in his pocket for an envelope; he opened it and carefully produced a cutting of blue brocade embroidered with silver and seed-pearls.

“What is it?” asked Urania, in ecstasy.

And he said that he had brought her a pattern of her majesty’s last dress; his cousin—not a Black, like himself, but a White, belonging not to the papal but to the court party and a lady-in-waiting to the queen—had procured this cutting for him for Urania’s album. Urania would see it herself: the queen would wear the dress at next week’s court ball. He was not going, he did not even go to his cousin’s officially, not to her parties; but he saw her sometimes, because of the family relationship, out of friendship. And he begged Urania not to give him away: it might injure him in his career—“What career?” Cornélie wondered to herself—if people knew that he saw much of his cousin; but he had called on her pretty often lately, for Urania’s sake, to get her that pattern.

And Urania was so grateful that she forgot all about the social position of girls and women, married or unmarried, and would gladly have sacrificed her right to the franchise for such a charming Italian prince. Cornélie became vexed, rose, bowed coldly to the prince and drew Urania with her to the door:

“Don’t forget what we have been saying,” she warned her. “Be on your guard.”

And she saw the prince look at her sarcastically, as they whispered together, suspecting that she was talking about him, but proud of the power of his personality and his title and his attentions over the daughter of an American stockinet-manufacturer.

CHAPTER XVII

A coolness had arisen between Mrs. van der Staal and Cornélie; and Cornélie no longer went to dine at Belloni’s. She did not see mevrouw and the girls again for weeks; but she saw Duco daily. Notwithstanding the essential differences in their characters, they had grown so accustomed to being together that they missed each other if a day passed without their meeting; and so they had gradually come to lunch and dine together every day, almost as a matter of course: in the morning at the osteria and in the evening at some small restaurant or other, usually very simply. To avoid dividing the bill, Duco would pay one time and Cornélie the next. Generally they had much to talk about: he taught her Rome, took her after lunch to all manner of churches and museums; and under his guidance she began to understand, appreciate and admire. By unconscious suggestion he inspired her with some of his ideas. She found painting very difficult, but understood sculpture much more readily. And she began to look upon him as not merely morbid; she looked up to him, he spoke quite simply to her, as from his exalted standpoint of feeling and knowledge and understanding, of very exalted matters which she, as a girl and later as a young married woman, had never seen in the glorious apotheosis which he caused to rise before her like the first gleam of a dawn, of a new day in which she beheld new types of life, created of all that was noblest in the artist’s soul. He regretted that he could not show her Giotto in the Santa Croce at Florence and the Primitives in the Uffizi and that he had to teach her Rome straight away; but he introduced her to all the exuberant art-life of the Papal Renascence, until, under the influence of his speech, she shared that life for a single intense second and until Michael Angelo and Raphael stood out before her, also living. After a day like that, he would think that after all she was not so hopelessly inartistic; and she thought of him with respect, even after the suggestion was interrupted and when she reflected on what she had seen and heard and really, deep down in herself, no longer understood things so well as she had that morning, because she was lacking in love for them. But so much glamour of colour and the past remained whirling before her eyes in the evening that it made her pamphlet seem drab and dull; and the feminist movement ceased to interest her and she did not care about Urania Hope.

He admitted to himself that he had quite lost his peace of mind, that Cornélie stood before him in his thoughts, between him and his old triptychs, that his lonely, friendless, ingenuous, simple life, content with wandering through and outside Rome, with reading, dreaming and now and then painting a little, had changed entirely in habit and in line, now that the line of his life had crossed that of hers and they both seemed to be going one way, he did not really know why. Love was not exactly the word for the feeling that drew him towards her. And just very vaguely, inwardly and unconsciously he suspected, though he never actually said or even thought as much, that it was the line of her figure, which was marked by something almost Byzantine, the slenderness of the frame, the long arms, the drooping lily-line of the woman who suffered, with the melancholy in her grey eyes, overshadowed by their almost too-long lashes; that it was the noble shape of her hand, small and pretty for a tall woman; that it was a movement of her neck, as of a swaying stalk, or a tired swan trying to glance backwards. He had never met many women and those whom he had met had always seemed very ordinary; but she was unreal to him, in the contradictions of her character, in its vagueness and intangibility, in all the half-tints which escaped his eye, accustomed to half-tints though it was.... What was she like? What he had always seen in her character was a woman in a novel, a heroine in a poem. What was she as a living woman of flesh and blood? She was not artistic and she was not inartistic; she had no energy and yet she did not lack energy; she was not precisely cultivated; and yet, obeying her impulse and her intuition, she wrote a pamphlet on one of the most modern questions and worked at it and revised and copied it, till it became a piece of writing no worse than another. She had a spacious way of thinking, loathing all the pettiness of the cliques, no longer feeling at home, after her suffering, in her little Hague set; and here, in Rome, at a dance she listened behind a door to a nonsensical conspiracy, hardly worthy of the name, he thought, and had gone to Urania Hope to mingle with the confused curves of smaller lives, curves without importance, of people whom he despised for their lack of line, of colour, of vision, of haze, of everything that was dear as life to him and made up life for him.... What was she like? He did not understand her. But her curve was of importance to him. She was not without a line: a line of art and line of life; she moved in the dream of her own indefiniteness before his gazing eyes; and she loomed up out of the haze, as out of the twilight of his studio atmosphere, and stood before him like a phantom. He would not call that love; but she was dear to him like a revelation that constantly veiled itself in secrecy. And his life as a lonely wanderer was, it was true, changed; but she had introduced no inharmonious habit into his life: he enjoyed taking his meals in a little café or osteria; and she took them with him easily and simply, not squalidly but pleasantly and harmoniously, with an adaptability and with just as much natural grace as when she used to dine of an evening at the table-d’hôte at Belloni’s. All this—that contradictory admixture of unreality, of inconsistency; that living vision of indefiniteness; that intangibility of her individual essence; that self-concealment of the soul; that blending of her essential characteristics—had become a charm to him: a restlessness, a need, a nervous want in his life, otherwise so restful, so easily contented and calm, but above all a charm, an indispensable every-day charm.

And, without troubling about what people might think, about what Mrs. van der Staal thought, they would one day go to Tivoli together, or another day walk from Castel Gandolfo to Albano and drive to the Lago di Nemi and picnic at the Villa Sforza-Cesarini, with the broken capital of a classic pillar for a table. They rested side by side in the shadow of the trees, admired the camellias, silently contemplated the glassy clearness of the lake, Diana’s looking-glass, and drove back over Frascati. They were silent in the carriage; and he smiled as he reflected how they had been taken everywhere that day for man and wife. She also thought of their increasing intimacy and at the same time thought that she would never marry again. And she thought of her husband and compared him with Duco, so young in the face but with eyes full of depth and soul, a voice so calm and even, with everything that he said much to the point, so accurately informed; and then his calmness, his simplicity, his lack of passion, as though his nerves had schooled themselves only to feel the calmness of art in the dreamy mist of his life. And she confessed to herself, there, in the carriage beside him, amid the softly shelving hills, purpling away in the evening, while before her faded the rose-mallow of a pale gold sunset, that he was dear to her because of that cleverness, that absence of passion, that simplicity and that accuracy of information—a clear voice sounding up out of the dreamy twilight—and that she was happy to be sitting beside him, to hear that voice and by chance to feel his hand, happy in that her line of life had crossed his, in that their two lines seemed to form a path towards the increasing brightness, the gradual daily elucidation of their immediate future....

CHAPTER XVIII

Cornélie now saw no one except Duco. Mrs. van der Staal had broken with her and would not allow her daughters to have any further intercourse with her. A coolness had arisen even between the mother and the son. Cornélie saw no one now except Duco and, at times, Urania Hope. The American girl came to her pretty often and told her about Belloni’s, where the people talked about Cornélie and Duco and commented on their relations. Urania was glad to think herself above that hotel gossip, but still she wanted to warn Cornélie. Her words displayed a simple spontaneity of friendship that appealed to Cornélie. When Cornélie, however, asked after the prince, she became silent and confused and evidently did not wish to say much. Then, after the court ball, at which the queen had really worn the dress embroidered with seed-pearls, Urania came and looked Cornélie up again and admitted, over a cup of tea, that she had that morning promised to go and see the prince at his own place. She said this quite simply, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Cornélie was horrified and asked her how she could have promised such a thing.

“Why not?” Urania replied. “What is there in it? I receive his visits. If he asks me to come and see his rooms—he lives in the Palazzo Ruspoli and wants to show me his pictures and miniatures and old lace—why should I refuse to go? Why should I make a fuss about it? I am above any such narrow-mindedness. We American girls go about freely with our men friends. And what about yourself? You go for walks with Mr. van der Staal, you lunch with him, you go for trips with him, you go to his studio....”

“I have been married,” said Cornélie. “I am responsible to no one. You have your parents. What you are thinking of doing is imprudent and high-handed. Tell me, does the prince think of ... marrying you?”

“If I become a Catholic.”

“And ...?”

“I think ... I shall. I have written to Chicago,” she said, hesitatingly.

She closed her beautiful eyes for a second and went pale, because the title of princess and duchess flashed before her sight.

“Only ...” she began.

“Only what?”

“I sha’n’t have a cheerful life. The prince belongs to the Blacks. They are always in mourning because of the Pope. They have hardly anything in their set: no dances, no parties. If we got married, I should like him to come to America with me. Their home in the Abruzzi is a lonely, tumbledown castle. His father is a very proud, stand-offish, silent person. I have been told so by ever so many people. What am I to do, Cornélie? I’m very fond of Gilio: his name is Virgilio. And then, you know, the title is an old Italian title: Principe di Forte-Braccio, Duca di San Stefano.... But then, you see, that’s all there is to it. San Stefano is a hole. That’s where his papa lives. They sell wine and live on that. And olive-oil; but they don’t make any money. My father manufactures stockinet; but he has grown rich on it. They haven’t many family-jewels. I have made enquiries.... His cousin, the Contessa di Rosavilla, the lady in waiting to the queen, is nice ... but we shouldn’t see her officially. I shouldn’t be able to go anywhere. It does strike me as rather boring.”

Cornélie spoke vehemently, blazed out and repeated her phrases: against marriage in general and now against this marriage in particular, merely for the sake of a title. Urania assented: it was merely for the title; but then there was Gilio too, of course: he was so nice and she was fond of him. But Cornélie didn’t believe a word of it and told her so straight out. Urania began to cry: she did not know what to do.

“And when were you to go to the prince?”

“This evening.”

“Don’t go.”

“No, no, you’re right, I sha’n’t go.”

“Do you promise me?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Don’t go, Urania.”

“No, I sha’n’t go. You’re a dear girl. You’re quite right: I won’t go. I swear to you I won’t.”

CHAPTER XIX

The undertaking which Urania had given was so vague, however, that Cornélie felt uneasy and spoke of it to Duco that evening, when she met him at the restaurant. But he was not interested in Urania, in what she did or didn’t do; and he shrugged his shoulders indifferently. Cornélie, on the other hand, was silent and absent-minded and did not listen to what he was talking about: a side-panel of a triptych, undoubtedly by Lippo Memmi, which he had discovered in a little shop by the Tiber; the angel of the Annunciation, almost as beautiful as the one in the Uffizi, kneeling with the stir of his last flight yet about him, with the lily-stem in his hands. But the dealer asked two hundred lire for it and he did not want to give more than fifty. And yet the dealer had not mentioned Memmi’s name, did not suspect that the angel was by Memmi.

Cornélie was not listening; and suddenly she said:

“I am going to the Palazzo Ruspoli.”

He looked up in surprise:

“What for?”

“To ask for Miss Hope.”

He was dumb with amazement and continued to look at her open-mouthed.

“If she’s not there,” Cornélie went on, “it’s all right. If she is, if she has gone after all, I’ll ask to speak to her on urgent business.”

He did not know what to say, thinking her sudden idea so strange, so eccentric, thinking it so unnecessary that her curve should cross the curves of insignificant, indifferent people, that he did not know how to choose his words. Cornélie glanced at her watch:

“It’s past half-past nine. If she does go, she will go about this time.”

She called the waiter and paid the bill. And she buttoned her coat and stood up. He followed after her:

“Cornélie,” he began, “isn’t what you are doing rather strange? It’ll mean all sorts of worries for you.”

“If one always objected to being worried, one would never do a good action.”

They walked on in silence, he moving irritably by her side. They did not speak: he thought her intention simply crazy; she thought him wanting in chivalry, not to wish to protect Urania. She was thinking of her pamphlet, of her fellow-women; and she wanted to protect Urania from marriage, from that prince. And they walked through the Corso to the Palazzo Ruspoli. He became nervous, made another attempt to restrain her; but she had already asked the porter:

“Is il signore principe at home?”

The man looked at her suspiciously:

“No,” he said, curtly.

“I believe he is. If so, ask if Miss Hope is with his excellency. Miss Hope was not at home; I believe that she was coming to see the prince this evening; and I want to speak to her urgently ... on a matter which will not brook delay. Here: la Signora de Retz....”

She handed him her card. She spoke with the greatest self-possession and referred to Urania’s visit calmly and simply, as though it were an every-day occurrence for American girls to call on Italian princes in the evening and as though she were persuaded that the porter knew of this custom. The man was disconcerted by her attitude, bowed, took the card and went away. Cornélie and Duco waited in the portico.

He admired her calmness. He considered her behaviour eccentric; but she carried out her eccentricity with a self-assurance which once more showed her in a new light. Would he never understand her, would he never grasp anything or know anything for certain of that changeful and intangible vagueness of hers? He could never have spoken those few words to that porter in just that tone! Where had she got that tact from, that dignified, serious attitude towards that imposing janitor, with his long cane and his cocked hat? She did it all as easily as she ordered their simple dinner, with a pleasant familiarity, of the waiter at their little restaurant.

The porter returned:

“Miss Hope and his excellency beg that you will come upstairs.”

She looked at Duco with a triumphant smile, amused at his confusion:

“Will you come too?”

“Why, no,” he stammered. “I can wait for you here.”

She followed the footman up the stairs. The wide corridor was hung with family-portraits. The drawing-room door was open and the prince came out to meet her.

“Please forgive me, prince,” she said, calmly, putting out her hand.

His eyes were small and pinched and gleamed like carbuncles; he was white with rage; but he controlled himself and pressed his lips to the hand which she gave him.

“Forgive me,” she went on. “I want to speak to Miss Hope on an urgent matter.”

She entered the drawing-room; Urania was there, blushing and embarrassed.

“You understand,” Cornélie said, with a smile, “that I would not have disturbed you if it had not been important. A question between women ... and still important!” she continued, jestingly; and the prince made an insipid, gallant reply. “May I speak to Miss Hope alone for a moment?”

The prince looked at her. He suspected unfriendliness in her and more, hostility. But he bowed, with his insipid smile, and said that he would leave the ladies to themselves. He went to another room.

“What is it, Cornélie?” asked Urania, in agitation.

She took Cornélie’s two hands and looked at her anxiously.

“Nothing,” said Cornélie, severely. “I have nothing to say to you. Only I had my suspicions and felt sure that you would not keep your promise. I wanted to make certain if you were here. Why did you come?”

Urania began to weep.

“Don’t cry!” whispered Cornélie, mercilessly. “For God’s sake don’t start crying. You’ve done the most thoughtless thing imaginable....”

“I know I have!” Urania confessed, nervously, drying her tears.

“Then why did you do it?”

“I couldn’t help it.”

“Alone, with him, in the evening! A man well-known to be a bad lot.”

“I know.”

“What do you see in him?”

“I’m fond of him.”

“You only want to marry him for his title. For the sake of his title you’re compromising yourself. What if he doesn’t respect you this evening as his future wife? What if he compels you to be his mistress?”

“Cornélie! Don’t!”

“You’re a child, a thoughtless child. And your father lets you travel by yourself ... to see ‘dear old Italy!’ You’re an American and broad-minded: that’s all right; to travel through the world pluckily on your own is all right; but you’re not a woman, you’re a baby!”

“Cornélie....”

“Come away with me; say that you’re going with me ... for an urgent reason. Or no ... better say nothing. Stay. But I’ll stay too.”

“Yes, you stay too.”

“We’ll send for him now.”

“Yes.”

Cornélie rang the bell. A footman appeared.

“Tell his excellency that we are ready.”

The man went away. In a little while the prince entered. He had never been treated like that in his own house. He was seething with rage, but he remained very polite and outwardly calm:

“Is the important matter settled?” he asked, with his small eyes and his hypocritical smile.

“Yes; thank you very much for your discretion in leaving us to ourselves,” said Cornélie. “Now that I have spoken to Miss Hope, I am greatly relieved by what she has told me. Aha, you would like to know what we were talking about!”

The prince raised his eyebrows. Cornélie had spoken archly, holding up her finger as though in threat, smiling; and the prince looked at her and saw that she was handsome. Not with the striking beauty and freshness of Urania Hope, but with a more complex attractiveness, that of a married woman, divorced, but very young; that of a fin-de-siècle woman, with a faintly perverse expression in her deep grey eyes, moving under very long lashes; that of a woman of peculiar grace in the drooping lines of her tired, lax, morbid charm: a woman who knew life; a woman who saw through him: he was certain of it; a woman who, though disliking him, nevertheless spoke to him coquettishly in order to attract him, to win him, unconsciously, from sheer womanly perversity. And he saw her, in her perverse beauty, and admired her, sensitive as he was to various types of women. He suddenly thought her handsomer and less commonplace than Urania and much more distinguished and not so ingenuously susceptible to his title, a thing which he thought so silly in Urania. He was suddenly at his ease with her, his anger subsided: he thought it fun to have two good-looking women with him instead of one; and he jested in return, saying that he was consumed with curiosity, that he had been listening at the door but had been unable to catch a word, alas!

Cornélie laughed with coquettish gaiety and looked at her watch. She said something about going, but sat down at the same time, unbuttoned her coat and said to the prince:

“I have heard so much about your miniatures. Now that I have the chance, may I see them?”

The prince was willing, charmed by the look in her eyes, by her voice; he was all fire and flame in a second.

“But,” said Cornélie, “my escort is waiting outside in the portico. He would not come up: he doesn’t know you. It is Mr. van der Staal.”

The prince laughed as he glanced at her. He knew of the gossip at Belloni’s. He did not for a moment doubt the existence of a liaison between Van der Staal and Signora de Retz. He knew that they did not care for the proprieties. And he began to like Cornélie very much.

“But I will send to Mr. van der Staal at once to ask him to come up.”

“He is waiting in the portico,” said Cornélie. “He won’t like to....”

“I’ll go myself,” said the prince, with obliging vivacity.

He left the room. The ladies stayed behind. Cornélie took off her coat, but kept on her hat, because her hair was sure to be untidy. She looked into the glass:

“Have you your powder on you?” she asked Urania.

Urania took her little ivory powder-box from her bag and handed it to Cornélie. And, while Cornélie powdered her face, Urania looked at her friend and did not understand. She remembered the impression of seriousness which Cornélie had made on her at their first meeting: studying Rome; afterwards, writing a pamphlet on the woman question and the position of divorced women. Then her warnings against marriage and the prince. And now she suddenly saw her as a most attractive, frivolous woman, irresistibly charming, even more bewitching than actually beautiful, full of coquetry in the depths of her grey eyes, which glanced up and down under the curling lashes, simply dressed in a dark-silk blouse and a cloth skirt, but with so much distinction and so much coquetry, with so much dignity and yet with a touch of yielding winsomeness, that she hardly knew her.

But the prince had returned, bringing Duco with him. Duco was nervously reluctant, not knowing what had happened, not grasping how Cornélie had acted. He saw her sitting quietly, smiling; and she at once explained that the prince was going to show her his miniatures.

Duco declared flatly that he did not care for miniatures. The prince suspected from his irritable tone that he was jealous. And this suspicion incited the prince to pay attentions to Cornélie. And he behaved as though he were showing his miniatures only to her, as though he were showing her his old lace. She admired the lace in particular and rolled it between her delicate fingers. She asked him to tell her about his grandmothers, who used to wear the lace: had they had any adventures? He told her one, which made her laugh very much; then he told an anecdote or two, vivaciously, flaming up under her glance, and she laughed. Amid the atmosphere of that big drawing-room, his study—it contained his writing-table—with the candles lighted and flowers everywhere for Urania, a certain perverse gaiety began to reign, an airy joie de vivre. But only between Cornélie and the prince. Urania had fallen silent; and Duco did not speak a word. Cornélie was a revelation to him also. He had never seen her like that: not at the dance on Christmas Day, nor at the table-d’hôte, nor in his studio, nor on their excursions, nor in their restaurant. Was she a woman, or was she ten women?

And he confessed to himself that he loved her, that he loved her more at each revelation, more with each woman that he saw in her, like a new facet which she made to gleam and glitter. But he could not speak, could not join in their pleasantry, feeling strange in that atmosphere, strange in that atmosphere of buoyant animal spirits, caused by nothing but aimless words, as though the French and Italian which they mixed up together were dropping so many pearls, as though their jests shone like so much tinsel, as though their equivocal playing upon words had the iridescence of a rainbow....

The prince regretted that his tea was no longer fit to drink, but he rang for some champagne. He thought that his plans had partly failed that evening, for, fearing to lose Urania, he had intended to compel her; seeing her hesitation, he had resolved to force the irreparable. But his nature was so devoid of seriousness—he was marrying to please his father and the Marchesa Belloni rather than himself; he enjoyed his life quite as well with a load of debts and no wife as he could hope to do with a wife and millions of money—that he began to consider the failure of his plans highly amusing and had to laugh within himself when he thought of his father, of his aunt, the marchesa, and of their machinations, which had no effect on Urania, because a pretty, flirtatious woman had objected.

“Why did she object?” he wondered, as he poured out the foaming Monopole, spilling it over the glasses. “Why does she put herself between me and the American stocking-seller? Is she herself in Italy hunting for a title?”

But he did not care: he thought the intruder charming, pretty, very pretty, coquettish, seductive, bewitching. He fussed around her, neglecting Urania, almost forgetting to fill her glass. And, when it grew late and Cornélie at last rose to go and drew Urania’s arm through hers and looked at the prince with a glance of triumph which they mutually understood, he whispered in her ear:

“I am ever so grateful to you for visiting me in my humble abode. You have defeated me: I acknowledge myself defeated.”

The words appeared to be merely an allusion to their jesting discussion about nothing; but, uttered between him and her, between the prince and Cornélie, they sounded full of meaning; and he saw the smile of victory in her eyes....

He remained behind in his room and poured himself out what remained of the champagne. And, as he raised the glass to his lips, he said, aloud:

“O, che occhi! Che belli occhi!... Che belli occhi!...”

CHAPTER XX

Next day, when Duco met Cornélie at the osteria, she was very cheerful and excited. She told him that she had already received a reply from the woman’s paper to which she had sent her pamphlet the week before and that her work was not only accepted but would be paid for. She was so proud at earning money for the first time that she was as merry as a little child. She did not speak of the previous evening, seemed to have forgotten Urania, but felt an exuberant need to talk.

She formed all sorts of great plans: to travel about as a journalist, to fling herself into the movement of the great cities, to pursue every reality, to have herself sent by some paper as a delegate to congresses and festivals. The few guilders which she was earning already made her intoxicated with zeal; and she would like to make a lot of money and do a great deal and consider no fatigue. He thought her simply adorable: in the half light of the osteria, as she sat at the little table eating her gnocchi, with in front of her the mezzofiasco of pale-yellow wine of the country, her usual languor acquired a new vivacity which astonished him; her outline, half-dark on the left, lighted on the right by the sunshine in the street, acquired a modern grace of drawing which reminded him of the French draughtsmen: the rather pale face with the delicate features, lit up by her smile, faintly indicated under the sailor hat, which slanted over her eyes; the hair, touched with gold, or a dark light-brown; the white veil raised into a rumpled mist above; her figure, slender and gracious in the simple, unbuttoned coat, with a bunch of violets in her blouse.

The manner in which she helped herself to wine, in which she addressed the cameriere—the only one, who knew them well, from seeing them daily—with a pleasant familiarity; the vivacity replacing her languor; her great plans, her gay phrases: all this seemed to shine upon him, unconstrained and yet distinguished, free and yet womanly and, above all, easy, as she was at her ease everywhere, with an assimilative tact which for him constituted a peculiar harmony. He thought of the evening before, but she did not speak of it. He thought of that revelation of her coquetry, but she was not thinking of coquetry. She was never coquettish with him. She looked up to him, regarded him as clever and exceptional, though not belonging to his time; she respected him for the things which he said and thought; and she was as matter of fact towards him as one chum towards another, who happened to be older and cleverer. She felt for him a sincere friendship, an indescribable something that implied the need of being together, of living together, as though the lines of their two lives should form one line. It was not a sisterly feeling and it was not passion and to her mind it was not love; but it was a great sense of respectful tenderness, of longing admiration and of affectionate delight at having met him. If she never saw him again, she would miss him as she would never miss any one in her life. And that he took no interest in modern questions did not lower him in the eyes of this young modern Amazon, who was about to wave her first banner. It might vex her for an instant, but it did not carry weight in her estimation of him. And he saw that, with him, she was simply affectionate, without coquetry. Yet he would never forget what she had been like yesterday, with the prince. He had felt jealousy and noticed it in Urania also. But she herself had acted so spontaneously in harmony with her nature that she no longer thought of that evening, of the prince, of Urania, of her own coquettishness or of any possible jealousy on their side.

He paid the bill—it was his turn—and she gaily took his arm and said that she had a surprise in store for him, with which he would be very pleased. She wanted to give him something, a handsome, a very handsome keepsake. She wanted to spend on it the money she was going to receive for her article. But she hadn’t got it yet ... as though that mattered! It would come in due time. And she wanted to give him his present now.

He laughed and asked what it could be. She hailed a carriage and whispered an address to the driver. Duco did not hear. What could it be? But she refused to tell him yet.

The vetturino drove them through the Borgo to the Tiber and stopped outside a dark little old-curiosity-shop, where the wares lay heaped up right out into the street.

“Cornélie!” Duco exclaimed, guessing.

“Your Lippo Memmi angel. I’m getting it for you. Not a word!”

The tears came to his eyes. They entered the shop.

“Ask him how much he wants for it.”

He was too much moved to speak; and Cornélie had to ask the price and bargain. She did not bargain long: she bought the panel for a hundred and twenty lire. She herself carried it to the victoria.

And they drove back to his studio. They carried the angel up the stairs together, as though they were bearing an unsullied happiness into his home. In the studio they placed the angel on a chair. Of a noble aspect, of a somewhat Mongolian type, with long, almond-shaped eyes, the angel had just knelt down in the last stir of his flight; and the gold scarf of his gold-and-purple cloak fluttered in the air while his long wings quivered straight above him. Duco stared at his Memmi, filled with a two-fold emotion, because of the angel and because of her.

And with a natural gesture he spread out his arms:

“May I thank you, Cornélie?”

And he embraced her; and she returned his kiss.

CHAPTER XXI

When she came home she found the prince’s card. It was an ordinary civility after yesterday evening, her unexpected visit to the Palazzo Ruspoli, and she did not give it a second thought. She was in a pleasant frame of mind, pleased with herself, glad that her work would appear first as an article in Het Recht der Vrouw[1]—she would publish it as a pamphlet afterwards—and glad that she had made Duco happy with the Memmi. She changed into her tea-gown and sat down by the fire in her musing attitude and thought of how she could carry out her great plans. To whom ought she to apply? There was an International Women’s Congress sitting in London; and Het Recht der Vrouw had sent her a prospectus. She turned over the pages. Different feminist leaders were to speak; there would be numbers of social questions discussed: the psychology of the child; the responsibility of the parents; the influence on domestic life of women’s admission to all the professions; women in art, women in medicine; the fashionable woman; the woman at home, on the stage; marriage- and divorce-laws.

In addition the prospectus gave concise biographies of the speakers, with their portraits. There were American, Russian, English, Swedish, Danish women; nearly every nationality was represented. There were old women and young women; some pretty, some ugly; some masculine, some womanly; some hard and energetic, with sexless boys’ faces; one or two only were elegant, with low-cut dresses and waved hair. It was not easy to divide them into groups. What impulse in their lives had prompted them to join in the struggle for women’s rights? In some, no doubt, inclination, nature; in an occasional case, vocation; in another, the desire to be in the fashion. And, in her own case, what was the impulse?... She dropped the prospectus in her lap and stared into the fire and reflected. Her drawing-room education passed before her once more, followed by her marriage, by her divorce....

What was the impulse? What was the inducement?... She had come to it gradually, to go abroad, to extend her sphere of vision, to reflect, to learn about art, about the modern life of women. She had glided gradually along the line of her life, with no great effort of will or striving, without even thinking much or feeling much.... She glanced into herself, as though she were reading a modern novel, the psychology of a woman. Sometimes she seemed to will things, to wish to strive, as just now, to pursue her great plans. Sometimes she would sit thinking, as she often did in these days, beside her cosy fire. Sometimes she felt, as she now did, for Duco. But mostly her life had been a gradual gliding along the line which she had to follow, urged by the gentle pressure of the finger of fate.... For a moment she saw it clearly. There was a great sincerity in her: she never posed either to herself or to others. There were contradictions in her, but she recognized them all, in so far as she could see herself. But the open landscape of her soul became clear to her at that moment. She saw the complexity of her being gleam with its many facets.... She had taken to writing, out of impulse and intuition; but was her writing any good? A doubt rose in her mind. A copy of the code lay on her table, a survival of the days of her divorce; but had she understood the law correctly? Her article was accepted; but was the judgement of the editress to be trusted? As her eyes wandered once again over those women’s portraits and biographies, she became afraid that her work would not be good, would be too superficial, and that her ideas were not directed by study and knowledge. But she could also imagine her own photograph appearing in that prospectus, with her name under it and a brief comment: writer of The Social Position of Divorced Women, with the name of the paper, the date and so on. And she smiled: how highly convincing it sounded!

But how difficult it was to study, to work and understand and act and move in the modern movement of life! She was now in Rome: she would have liked to be in London. But it did not suit her at the moment to make the journey. She had felt rich when she bought Duco’s Memmi, thinking of the payment for her article; and now she felt poor. She would much have liked to go to London. But then she would have missed Duco. And the congress lasted only a week. She was pretty well at home here now, was beginning to love Rome, her rooms, the Colosseum lying yonder like a dark oval, like a sombre wing at the end of the city, with the hazy-blue mountains behind it.

Then the prince came into her mind and for the first time she thought of yesterday, saw that evening again, an evening of jesting and champagne: Duco silent and sulky, Urania depressed and the prince small, lively, slender, roused from his slackness as an aristocratic man-about-town and with his narrow carbuncle eyes. She thought him really pleasant; once in a way she liked that atmosphere of coquetry and flirtation; and the prince had understood her. She had saved Urania, she was sure of that; and she felt the content of her good action....

She was too lazy to dress and go to the restaurant. She was not very hungry and would stay at home and sup on what was in her cupboard: a couple of eggs, bread, some fruit. But she remembered Duco and that he would certainly be waiting for her at their little table and she wrote him a note and sent it by the hall-porter’s boy....

Duco was just coming down, on his way out to the restaurant, when he met the little fellow on the stairs. He read the note and felt as if he was suffering a grievous disappointment. He felt small and unhappy, like a child. And he went back to his studio, lit a single lamp, threw himself on a broad couch and lay staring in the dusk at Memmi’s angel, who, still standing on the chair, glimmered vaguely gold in the middle of the room, sweet as comfort, with his gesture of annunciation, as though he sought to announce all the mystery that was about to be fulfilled....

[1] Woman’s Rights.

CHAPTER XXII

A few days later, Cornélie was expecting a visit from the prince, who had asked her for an appointment. She was sitting at her writing-table, correcting proofs of her article. A lamp on the writing-table cast a soft glow over her through a yellow silk shade; and she wore her tea-gown of white crêpe de Chine, with a bunch of violets at her breast. Another lamp, on a pedestal, cast a second gleam from a corner; and the room flickered in cosy intimacy with the third light from the log-fire, falling over water-colours by Duco, sketches and photographs, white anenomes in vases, violets everywhere and one tall palm. The writing-table was littered with books and printed sheets, bearing witness to her work.

There was a knock at the door; and, at her “Come in,” the prince entered. She remained seated for a moment, laid down her pen and rose. She went up to him with a smile and held out her hand. He kissed it. He was very smartly dressed in a frock-coat, with a silk hat and pale-grey gloves; he wore a pearl pin in his tie. They sat down by the fire and he paid her compliments in quick succession, on her sitting-room, her dress and her eyes. She made a jesting reply; and he asked if he was disturbing her:

“Perhaps you were writing an interesting letter to some one near your heart?”

“No, I was revising some proofs.”

“Proofs?”

“Yes.”

“Do you write?”

“I have just begun to.”

“A story?”

“No, an article.”

“An article? What about?”

She gave him the long title. He looked at her open-mouthed. She laughed gaily:

“You would never have believed it, would you?”

“Santa Maria!” he murmured in surprise, unaccustomed in his own world to “modern” women, taking part in a feminist movement. “Dutch?”

“Yes, Dutch.”

“Write in French next time: then I can read it.”

She laughed and gave her promise, poured him out a cup of tea, handed the chocolates. He nibbled at them:

“Are you so serious? Have you always been? You were not serious the other day.”

“Sometimes I am very serious.”

“So am I.”

“I gathered that. If I had not come that time, you might have become very serious.”

He gave a fatuous laugh and looked at her knowingly:

“You are a wonderful woman!” he said. “Very interesting and very clever. What you want to happen happens.”

“Sometimes.”

“Sometimes what I want also. Sometimes I also am very clever. When I want a thing. But generally I don’t want it.”

“You did the other day.”

He laughed:

“Yes! You were cleverer than I then. To-morrow perhaps I shall be cleverer than you.”

“Who knows!”

They both laughed. He nibbled the chocolates in the dish, one after the other, and asked if he might have a glass of port instead of tea. She poured him out a glass.

“May I give you something?”

“What?”

“A souvenir of our first acquaintance.”

“It is very charming of you. What is it to be?”

He took something wrapped in tissue-paper from his pocket and handed it to her. She opened the little parcel and saw a strip of old Venetian lace, worked in the shape of a flounce, for a low bodice.

“Do accept it,” he besought her. “It is a lovely piece. It is such a pleasure to me to give it to you.”

She looked at him with all her coquetry in her eyes, as though she were trying to see through him.

“You must wear it like this.”

He stood up, took the lace and draped it over her white tea-gown from shoulder to shoulder. His fingers fumbled with the folds, his lips just touched her hair.

She thanked him for his gift. He sat down again:

“I am glad that you will accept it.”

“Have you given Miss Hope something too?”

He laughed, with his little laugh of conquest:

“Patterns are all she wants, patterns of the queen’s ball-dresses. I wouldn’t dare to give you patterns. To you I give old lace.”

“But you nearly ruined your career for the sake of that pattern?”

“Oh, well!” he laughed.

“Which career?”

“Oh, don’t!” he said, evasively. “Tell me, what do you advise me to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Shall I marry her?”

“I am against all marriage, between cultivated people.”

She wanted to repeat some of her phrases, but thought to herself, why? He would not understand them. He looked at her profoundly, with his carbuncle eyes:

“So you are in favour of free love?”

“Sometimes. Not always. Between cultivated people.”

He was certain now, had any doubt still lingered in his mind, that a liaison existed between her and Van der Staal.

“And do you think me ... cultivated?”

She laughed provocatively, with a touch of scorn in her voice:

“Listen. Shall I speak to you seriously?”

“I wish you would.”

“I consider neither you nor Miss Hope suited for free love.”

“So I am not cultivated?”

“I don’t mean it in the sense of being civilized. I mean modern culture.”

“So I am not modern.”

“No,” she said, slightly irritated.

“Teach me to be modern.”

She gave a nervous laugh:

“Oh, don’t let us talk like this! You want to know my advice. I advise you not to marry Urania.”

“Why not?”

“Because you would both of you have a wretched life. She is a dear little American parvenue....”

“I am offering her what I possess; she is offering me what she possesses....”

He nibbled at the chocolates. She shrugged her shoulders:

“Then marry her,” she said, with indifference.

“Tell me that you don’t want me to and I won’t.”

“And your father? And the marchesa?”

“What do you know about them?”

“Oh ... everything and nothing!”

“You are a demon!” he exclaimed. “An angel and a demon! Tell me, what do you know about my father and the marchesa?”

“For how much are you selling yourself to Urania? For not less than ten millions?”

He looked at her in bewilderment.

“But the marchesa thinks five enough. And a very handsome sum it is: five millions. Which is it, dollars or lire?”

He clapped his hands together:

“You are a devil!” he cried. “You are an angel and a devil! How do you know? How do you know? Do you know everything?”

She flung herself back in her chair and laughed:

“Everything.”

“But how?”

She looked at him and shook her head tantalizingly.

“Tell me.”

“No. It’s my secret.”

“And you think that I ought not to sell myself?”

“I dare not advise you as regards your own interest.”

“And as regards Urania?”

“I advise her not to do it.”

“Have you done so already?”

“Once in a way.”

“So you are my enemy?” he exclaimed, angrily.

“No,” she said, gently, wishing to conciliate him. “I am a friend.”

“A friend? To what length?”

“To the length to which I wish to go.”

“Not the length to which I wish?”

“Oh, no, never!”

“But perhaps we both wish to go to the same length?”

He had stood up, with his blood on fire. She remained seated calmly, almost languidly, with her head thrown back. She did not reply. He fell on his knees, seized her hand and was kissing it before she could prevent him:

“Oh, angel, angel. Oh, demon!” he muttered, between his kisses.

She now withdrew her hand, pushed him away from her gently and said:

“How quick an Italian is with his kisses!”

She laughed at him. He rose from his knees:

“Teach me what Dutchwomen are like, though they are slower than we.”

She pointed to his chair, with an imperious gesture:

“Sit down,” she said. “I am not a typical Dutchwoman. If I were, I should not have come to Rome. I pride myself on being a cosmopolitan. But we were not discussing that, we were speaking of Urania. Are you thinking seriously of marrying her?”

“What can I do, if you thwart me? Why not be on my side, like a dear friend?”

She hesitated. Neither of these two, Urania or he, was ripe for her ideas. She despised them both. Very well, let them get married: he in order to be rich; she to become a princess and duchess.

“Listen to me,” she said, bending towards him. “You want to marry her for the sake of her millions. But your marriage will be unhappy from the beginning. She is a frivolous little thing; she will want to cut a dash ... and you belong to the Blacks.”

“We can live at Nice: then she can do as she pleases. We will come to Rome now and again, go to San Stefano now and again. And, as for unhappiness,” he continued, pulling a tragic face, “what do I care? I am not happy as it is. I shall try to make Urania happy. But my heart ... will be elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“With the feminist movement.”

She laughed:

“Well, shall I be nice to you?”

“Yes.”

“And promise to help you?”

What did she care, when all was said?

“Oh, angel, demon!” he cried. He nibbled at a chocolate. “And what does Mr. van der Staal think of it?” he asked, mischievously.

She raised her eyebrows:

“He doesn’t think about it. He thinks only of his art.”

“And of you.”

She looked at him and bowed her head in queenly assent:

“And of me.”

“You often dine with him.”

“Yes.”

“Come and dine with me one day.”

“I shall be delighted.”

“To-morrow evening? And where?”

“Wherever you like.”

“In the Grand-Hôtel?”

“Ask Urania to come too.”

“Why not you and I alone?”

“I think it better that you should invite your future wife. I will chaperon her.”

“You are right. You are quite right. And will you ask Mr. van der Staal also to give me the pleasure of his company?”

“I will.”

“Until to-morrow then, at half-past eight?”

“Until half-past eight to-morrow.”

He rose to take his leave:

“Propriety demands that I should go,” he said. “Really I should prefer to stay.”

“Well, then stay ... or stay another time, if you have to go now.”

“You are so cold.”

“And you don’t think enough of Urania.”

“I think of the feminist movement.”

He sat down.

“I’m afraid you must go,” she said, laughing with her eyes. “I have to dress ... to go and dine with Mr. van der Staal.”

He kissed her hand:

“You are an angel and a demon. You know everything. You can do anything. You are the most interesting woman I ever met.”

“Because I correct proofs.”

“Because you are what you are.”

And, very seriously, still holding her hand he said, almost threateningly:

“I shall never be able to forget you.”

And he went away. As soon as she was alone, she opened all her windows. She realized, it was true, that she was something of a coquette, but that lay in her nature: she was like that of herself, to some men. Certainly not to all. Never to Duco. Never to men whom she respected. Whereas she despised that little prince, with his blazing eyes and his habit of kissing people.... But he served to amuse her....

And she dressed and went out and reached the restaurant long after the appointed hour, found Duco waiting for her at their little table, with his head in his hands, and at once told him that the prince had detained her.

CHAPTER XXIII

Duco had at first wished to decline the invitation, but Cornélie said that she would think it pleasanter if he came. And it was an exquisite dinner in the restaurant of the Grand-Hôtel and Cornélie had enjoyed herself exceedingly and looked most charming in an old yellow ball-dress, dating back to the first days of her marriage, which she had altered quickly here and there and draped with the prince’s old lace. Urania had looked very handsome, with her clear, fresh complexion, her shining eyes and gleaming teeth, clad in a close-fitting frock in the latest fashion, blue-black spangles on black tulle, as though she were moulded in a cuirass: the prince said, a siren with a mermaid’s tail. And the people at the other tables had stared across at theirs, for everybody knew Virgilio di Forte-Braccio; everybody knew that he was going to marry a rich American heiress; and everybody had noticed that he was paying great attention to the slender, fair-haired woman whom nobody knew. She had been married, they thought; she was chaperoning the future princess; and she was very intimate with that young man, a Dutch painter, who was studying art in Italy. They had soon found out all that there was to know.

Cornélie had thought it pleasant that they all looked at her; and she had flirted so obviously with the prince that Urania had become angry. And early next morning, while Cornélie was still in bed, no longer thinking of last night but pondering over a sentence in her pamphlet, the maid knocked, brought in her breakfast and letters and said that Miss Hope was asking to speak to her. Cornélie had Urania shown in, while she remained in bed and drank her chocolate. And she looked up in surprise when Urania at once overwhelmed her with reproaches, burst into sobs, scolded and raved, made a violent scene, said that she now saw through her and admitted that the marchesa had urged her to be careful of Cornélie, whom she described as a dangerous woman. Cornélie waited until she had had her say and replied coolly that she had nothing on her conscience, that on the contrary she had saved Urania and been of service to her as a chaperon, though she did not tell her that the prince had wanted her, Cornélie, to dine with him alone. But Urania refused to listen and went on ranting. Cornélie looked at her and thought her vulgar in that rage of hers, talking her American English, as though she were chewing filberts; and at last she answered, calmly:

“My dear girl, you’re upsetting yourself about nothing. But, if you like, I will write to the prince that he must pay me no more attentions.”

“No, no, don’t do that: it’ll make Gilio think I’m jealous!”

“And aren’t you?”

“Why do you monopolize Gilio? Why do you flirt with him? Why do you make yourself conspicuous with him, as you did yesterday, in a restaurant full of people?”

“Well, if you dislike it, I won’t flirt with Gilio again or make myself conspicuous with him again. I don’t care twopence about your prince.”

“That’s an extra reason.”

“Very well, dear, that’s settled.”

Her coolness calmed Urania, who asked:

“And do we remain good friends?”

“Why, of course, my dear girl. Is there any occasion for us to quarrel? I don’t see it.”

Both of them, the prince and Urania, were quite indifferent to her. True, she had preached to Urania in the beginning, but about a general idea: when afterwards she perceived Urania’s insignificance, she withdrew the interest which she took in her. And, if the girl was offended by a little gaiety and innocent flirtation, very well, there should be no more of it. Her thoughts were more with the proofs which the post had brought her.

She got out of bed and stretched herself:

“Go into the sitting-room, Urania dear, and just let me have my bath.”

Presently, all fresh and smiling, she joined Urania in the sitting-room. Urania was crying.

“My dear child, why are you upsetting yourself like this? You’ve achieved your ideal. Your marriage is as good as certain. You’re waiting for an answer from Chicago? You’re impatient? Then cable out. I should have cabled at once in your place. You don’t imagine, do you, that your father has any objection to your becoming Duchess di San Stefano?”

“I don’t know yet what I myself want,” said Urania, weeping. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Cornélie shrugged her shoulders:

“You’re more sensible than I thought,” she said.

“Are you really my friend? Can I trust you? Can I trust your advice?”

“I won’t advise you again. I have advised you. You must know your own mind.”

Urania took her hand:

“Which would you prefer, that I accepted Gilio ... or not?”

Cornélie looked her straight in the eyes:

“You’re making yourself unhappy about nothing. You think—and the marchesa probably thinks with you—that I want to take Gilio from you? No, darling, I wouldn’t marry Gilio if he were king and emperor. I have a bit of the socialist in me: I don’t marry for the sake of a title.”

“No more would I.”

“Of course, darling, no more would you. I never dreamt of suggesting that you would. But you ask me which I should prefer. Well, I tell you in all sincerity: I don’t prefer either. The whole business leaves me cold.”

“And you call yourself my friend!”

“So I am, dear, and I will remain your friend. Only don’t come overwhelming me with reproaches on an empty stomach!”

“You’re a flirt.”

“Sometimes. It comes natural to me. But, honestly, I won’t be so again with Gilio.”

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes, of course. What do I care? He amuses me; but, if it offends you, I’ll gladly sacrifice my amusement for your sake. I don’t value it so much.”

“Are you fond of Mr. van der Staal?”

“Very.”

“Are you going to marry him, Cornélie?”

“No, dear. I sha’n’t marry again. I know what marriage means. Are you coming for a little walk with me? It’s a fine day; and you have upset me so with your little troubles that I can’t do any work this morning. It’s lovely weather: come along and buy some flowers in the Piazza di Spagna.”

They went and bought the flowers. Cornélie took Urania back to Belloni’s. As she walked away, on the road to the osteria for lunch, she heard somebody following her. It was the prince.

“I caught sight of you from the corner of the Via Aurora,” he said. “Urania was just going home.”

“Prince,” she said at once, “there must be no more of it.”

“Of what?”

“No more visits, no more joking, no more presents, no more dinners at the Grand-Hôtel, no more champagne.”

“Why not?”

“The future princess won’t have it.”

“Is she jealous?”

Cornélie described the scene to him:

“And you mayn’t even walk with me.”

“Yes, I may.”

“No, no.”

“I shall, for all that.”

“By the right of the man, of the strongest?”

“Exactly.”

“My vocation is to fight against it. But to-day I am untrue to my vocation.”

“You are charming ... as always.”

“You mustn’t say that any more.”

“Urania’s a bore.... Tell me, what do you advise me to do? Shall I marry her?”

Cornélie gave a peal of laughter:

“You both of you keep asking my advice!”

“Yes, yes, what do you think?”

“Marry her by all means!”

He did not observe her contempt.

“Exchange your escutcheon for her purse,” she continued and laughed and laughed.

He now perceived it:

“You despise me, perhaps both of us.”

“Oh, no!”

“Tell me that you don’t despise me.”

“You ask me my opinion. Urania is a very sweet, dear child, but she ought not to travel by herself. And you ...”

“And I?”

“You are a delightful boy. Buy me those violets, will you?”

“Subito, subito!”

He bought her the bunch of violets:

“You’re crazy over violets, aren’t you?”

“Yes. This must be your second ... and your last present. And here we say good-bye.”

“No, I shall take you home.”

“I’m not going home.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the osteria. Mr. van der Staal is waiting for me.”

“He’s a lucky man!”

“Why?”

“He needs must be!”

“I don’t see why. Good-bye, prince.”

“Ask me to come too,” he entreated. “Let me lunch with you.”

“No,” she said, seriously. “Really not. It’s better not. I believe....”

“What?”

“That Duco is just like Urania.”

“Jealous?... When shall I see you again?”

“Really, believe me, it’s better not.... Good-bye, prince. And thank you ... for the violets.”

He bent over her hand. She went into the osteria and saw that Duco had witnessed their leave-taking through the window.

CHAPTER XXIV

Duco was silent and nervous at table. He played with his bread; and his fingers trembled. She felt that he had something on his mind:

“What is it?” she asked, kindly.

“Cornélie,” he said, excitedly, “I want to speak to you.”

“What about?”

“You’re not behaving properly.”

“In what respect?”

“With the prince. You’ve seen through him and yet ... yet you go on putting up with him, yet you’re always meeting him. Let me finish,” he said, looking around him: there was no one in the restaurant save two Italians, sitting at the far table, and they could speak without being overheard. “Let me finish,” he repeated, when she tried to interrupt him. “Let me say what I have to say. You of course are free to act as you please. But I am your friend and I want to advise you. What you are doing is not right. The prince is a cad, a low, common cad. How can you accept presents from him and invitations? Why did you compel me to come yesterday? The dinner was one long torture to me. You know how fond I am of you: why shouldn’t I confess it? You know how high I hold you. I can’t bear to see you lowering yourself with him. Let me speak. Lowering, I say. He is not worthy to tie your shoe-strings. And you play with him, you jest with him, you flirt—let me speak—you flirt with him. What can he be to you, a coxcomb like that? What part can he play in your life? Let him marry Miss Hope: what do you care about either of them? What do inferior people matter to you, Cornélie? I despise them and so do you. I know you do. Then why do you cross their lives? Let them live in the vanity of their titles and money: what is it all to you? I don’t understand you. Oh, I know, you’re not to be understood, all the woman part of you! And I love everything that I see of you: I love you in everything. It doesn’t matter whether I understand you. But I do feel that this isn’t right. I ask you not to see the prince any more. Have nothing more to do with him. Cut him.... That dinner, last night, was a torture to me....”

“My poor boy,” she said, gently, filling his glass from their fiasco, “but why?”

“Why? Why? Because you’re lowering yourself.”

“I do not stand so high. No, let me speak now. I do not stand high. Because I have a few modern ideas and a few others which are broader-minded than those of most women? Apart from that I am an ordinary woman. When a man is cheerful and witty, it amuses me. No, Duco, I’m speaking now. I don’t consider the prince a cad. I may think him a coxcomb, but I think him cheerful and witty. You know that I too am very fond of you, but you are neither cheerful nor witty. Now don’t get angry. You are much more than that. I’m not even comparing il nostro Gilio with you. I won’t say anything more about you, or you will become conceited, but cheerful and witty you are not. And my poor nature sometimes feels a need for these qualities. What have I in my life? Nothing but you, you alone. I am very glad to possess your friendship, very happy in having met you. But why may I not sometimes be cheerful? Really, there is a little light-heartedness in me, a little frivolity even. Am I bound to fight against it? Duco, am I wicked?”

He smiled sadly; there was a moist light in his eyes; and he did not answer.

“I can fight, if necessary,” she resumed. “But is this a thing to fight against? It is a passing bubble, nothing more. I forget it the next minute. I forget the prince the next minute. And you I do not forget.”

He was looking at her radiantly.

“Do you understand that? Do you understand that I don’t flirt and fence with you? Shake hands and stop being angry.”

She gave him her hand across the table and he pressed her fingers:

“Cornélie,” he said, softly. “Yes, I feel that you are loyal. Cornélie, will you be my wife?”

She looked straight in front of her and drooped her head a little and stared before her earnestly. They were no longer eating. The two Italians stood up, bowed and went away. They were alone. The waiter set some fruit before them and withdrew.

They both sat silent for a moment. Then she spoke in a gentle voice; and her whole being displayed so tender a melancholy that he could have burst into sobs and worshipped her where she sat.

“I knew of course that you would ask me that some day. It was in the nature of things. A great friendship like ours was bound to lead to that question. But it can’t be, dearest Duco. It can’t be, my dear, dear boy. I have my own ideas ... but it’s not that. I am against marriage ... but it’s not that. In some cases a woman is unfaithful to all her ideas in a single second.... Then what is it?...”

She stared wide-eyed and passed her hand over her forehead, as though she did not see clearly. Then she continued:

“It is this, that I am afraid of marriage. I have been through it, I know what it means.... I see my husband before me now. I see that habit, that groove before me, in which the subtler individual characteristics are effaced. That is what marriage is: a habit, a groove. And I tell you candidly: I think marriage loathsome. I think passion beautiful, but marriage is not passion. Passion can be noble and superhuman, but marriage is a human institution based upon our petty human morality and calculation. And I have become frightened of those prudent moral ties. I promised myself—and I believe that I shall keep my promise—never to marry again. My whole nature has become unfitted for it. I am no longer the Hague girl going to parties and dinners and looking out for a husband, together with her parents.... My love for him was passion. And in my marriage he wanted to restrict that passion to a groove and a custom. Then I rebelled.... I’d rather not talk about it. Passion lasts too short a time to fill a married life.... Mutual esteem to follow, etcetera? One needn’t marry for that. I can feel esteem just as well without being married. Of course there is the question of the children, there are many difficulties. I can’t think it all out now. I merely feel now, very seriously and calmly, that I am not fit to marry and that I never will marry again. I should not make you happy.... Don’t be sad, Duco. I am fond of you, I love you. And perhaps ... had I met you at the right moment. Had I met you before, in my Hague life ... you would certainly have stood too high for me. I could not have grown fond of you. Now I can understand you, respect you and look up to you. I tell you this quite simply, that I love you and look up to you, look up to you, in spite of all your gentleness, as I never looked up to my husband, however much he made his manly privilege prevail. And you are to believe that, very firmly and with great certainty, and you must believe that I am true. I am coquettish ... only with Gilio.”

He looked at her through his silent tears. He stood up, called the waiter, paid the bill absent-mindedly, while everything swam and flashed before his eyes. They went out of the door and she hailed a carriage and told the man to drive to the Villa Doria-Pamphili. She remembered that the gardens were open. They drove there in silence, steeped in their thoughts of the future that was opening tremulously before them. Sometimes he heaved a deep breath and quivered all over his body. Once she fervently squeezed his hand. At the gate of the villa they alighted and walked up the majestic avenues. Rome lay in the depths below; and they suddenly saw St. Peter’s. But they did not speak; and she suddenly sat down on an ancient bench and began to weep softly and feebly. He put his arm round her and comforted her. She dried her tears, smiled and embraced him and returned his kiss.... Twilight fell; and they went back. He gave the address of his studio. She accompanied him. And she gave herself to him, in all her truthful sincerity and with a love so violent and so great that she thought she would swoon in his arms.

CHAPTER XXV

They did not alter their mode of life. Duco, however, after a scene with his mother, no longer slept at Belloni’s but in a little room adjoining his studio and at first filled with trunks and lumber. Cornélie was sorry about the scene: she had always had a liking for Mrs. van der Staal and the girls. But a certain pride arose in her; and Cornélie despised Mrs. van der Staal because she was unable to understand either her or Duco. Still, she would have been pleased to prevent this coolness. At her advice Duco went to see his mother again, but she remained cool and sent him away. Thereupon Cornélie and Duco went to Naples. They did not do this by way of an elopement, they did it quite simply: Cornélie told Urania and the prince that she was going to Naples for a little while and that Van der Staal would probably follow her. She did not know Naples and would appreciate it greatly if Van der Staal showed her over the town and the surrounding country. Cornélie kept on her rooms in Rome. And they spent a fortnight of sheer, careless and immense happiness. Their love grew spacious and blossoming in the golden sunlight of Naples, on the blue gulfs of Amalfi, Sorrento, Capri and Castellamare, simply, irresistibly and restfully. They glided gradually along the purple thread of their lives, they walked hand in hand down their lines now fused into one path, heedless of the laws and ideas of men; and their attitude was so lofty, their action so serene and so certain of their happiness, that their relations did not degenerate into insolence, although within themselves they despised the world. But this happiness softened all that pride in their soaring souls, as if their happiness were strewing blossoms all around it. They lived in a dream, first among the marbles in the museum, then on the flower-strewn cliffs of Amalfi, on the beach of Capri or on the terrace of the hotel at Sorrento, with the sea roaring at their feet and, in a pearly haze, yonder, vaguely white, as though drawn in white chalk, Castellamare and Naples and the ghost of Vesuvius, with its hazy plume of smoke.

They held aloof from everybody, from all the people and excursionists; they had their meals at a small table; and it was generally thought that they were newly married. If others looked up their names in the visitors’ book, they read two names and made whispered comments. But the lovers did not hear, did not see; they lived their dream, looking into each other’s eyes or at the opal sky, the pearly sea and the hazy, white mountain-vistas, studded with towns like little specks of chalk.

When their money was almost exhausted, they smiled and went back to Rome and resumed their former lives: she in her rooms and he, now, in his studio; and they took their meals together. But they pursued their dream among the ruins in the Via Appia, around and near Frascati, beyond the Ponte Molle, on the slopes of the Monte Mario and in the gardens of the villas, among the statues and paintings, mingling their happiness with the Roman atmosphere: he interweaving his new-found love with his love for Rome; she growing to love Rome because of him. And because of that charm they were surrounded by a sort of aura, through which they did not see ordinary life or meet ordinary people.

At last, one afternoon, Urania found them both at home, in Cornélie’s room, the fire lighted, she smiling and gazing into the fire, he sitting at her feet and she with her arm round his neck. And they were evidently thinking of so little besides their own love that neither of them heard her knock and both suddenly saw her standing before them, like an unexpected reality. Their dream was over for that day. Urania laughed, Cornélie laughed and Duco pushed an easy-chair closer. And Urania, blithe, beautiful and brilliant, told them that she was engaged. Where on earth had they been hiding, she asked, inquisitively. She was engaged. She had been to San Stefano, she had seen the old prince. And everything was lovely and good and dear: the old castle a dear old house, the old man a dear old man. She saw everything through the glitter of her future princess’ title. Princess and duchess! The wedding-day was fixed: immediately after Easter, in a little more than three months therefore. It was to be celebrated at San Carlo, with all the splendour of a great wedding. Her father was coming over for it with her youngest brother. She was obviously not looking forward to their arrival. And she never finished talking: she gave a thousand details about her bridal outfit, with which the marchesa was helping her. They were going to live at Nice, in a large flat. She raved about Nice: that was a first-rate idea of Gilio’s. And incidentally she remembered and told them that she had become a Catholic. That was a great nuisance! But the monsignori saw to everything and she allowed herself to be guided by them. And the Pope was to receive her in private audience, together with Gilio. The difficulty was what to wear at the audience: black, of course, but ... velvet, satin? What did Cornélie advise her? She had such excellent taste. And a black-lace veil on her head, with brilliants. She was going to Nice next day, with the marchesa and Gilio, to see their flat.

When she was gone, after begging Cornélie to come and admire her trousseau, Cornélie said, with a smile:

“She is happy. After all, happiness is something different for everybody. A trousseau and a title would not make me happy.”

“These are the small people,” he said, “who cross our lives now and again. I prefer to get out of their way.”

And they did not say so, but they both thought—with their fingers interlaced, her eyes gazing into his—that they also were happy, but with a loftier, better and nobler happiness; and pride arose within them; and they beheld as in a vision the line of their life winding up a steep hill. But happiness snowed blossoms down upon it; and amid the snowing blossoms, holding high their proud heads, with smiles and eyes of love, they walked on in their dream remote from mankind and reality.

CHAPTER XXVI

The months dreamed past. And their happiness caused such a summer to bloom in them that she ripened in beauty and he in talent; the pride in them broke into expression: in her it was the blossoming of her being, in him it was energy; her languid charm became transformed into a proud slenderness; her contour increased in fullness; a light illumined her eyes, a gladness shone about her mouth. His hands quivered with nervous emotion when he took up his brushes; and the skies of Italy arched firmaments before his eyes like a canopy of love and fervid colour. He drew and completed a series of water-colours: hazes of dreamy atmosphere which suggested Turner’s noblest creations; natural monuments of sheer haze; all the milky blue and pearly mistiness of the Bay of Naples, like a goblet filled with light in which a turquoise is melted into water; and he sent them to Holland, to London, found that he had suddenly discovered his vocation, his work and his fame: courage, strength, aim and conquest.

She too achieved a certain success with her article: it was discussed, contested; her name was mentioned. But she felt a certain indifference when she read her name in connection with the feminist movement. She preferred to live with him his life of observation and emotion; and she often imparted to all the haze of his vision, to the excessive haziness of his colour-dream a lustre of light, a definite horizon, a streak of actuality which gave realism to the mist of his ideal. She learnt with him to distinguish and to feel nature, art, all Rome; and, when a symbolic impulse overmastered him, she surrendered herself to it entirely. He planned a large sketch of a procession of women, mounting along a line of life that wound up a hill: they seemed to be moving out of a crumbling city of antiquity, whose pillars, joined by a single architrave, quivered on high in a violet haze of evening dusk; they seemed to be releasing themselves from the shadow of the ruins fading away on the horizon into the void of night; and they thronged upwards, calling to one another aloud, beckoning to one another with great waving gestures of their hands, under a mighty fluttering of streamers and pennants; they grasped hammer and pick-axe with sinewy arms; and the throng of them moved up and up, along the line, where the light grew whiter and whiter, until in the hazy air there dimly showed the distant vista of a new city, whose iron buildings, like central stations and Eiffel towers in the white glimmer of the distance, gleamed up very faintly with a reflection of glass arches and glass roofs and, high in the air, the musical staves of the threads of sound and accompaniment....

And to so great an extent did their influences work upon each other’s souls that she learnt to see and he learnt to think: she saw beauty, art, nature, haze and emotion and no longer imagined them but felt them; he, as in his sketch, a very vague, modern city of glass and iron, saw a modern city rising out of his dream-haze and thought of a modern question, in accordance with his own nature and aptitudes. She learnt above all to see and feel like a woman in love, with the eyes and heart of the man she loves; he thought out the question plastically. But whatever the imperfection in the absoluteness of their new spheres of feeling and thought, the reciprocal influence, through their love, gave them a happiness so great, so united, that at that moment they could not contemplate it or apprehend it: it was almost ecstasy, a faint unreality, in which they dreamed, whereas it was all pure truth and tangible actuality. Their manner of thinking, feeling and living was an ideal of reality, an ideal entered and attained, along the gradual line of their life, along the golden thread of their love; and they scarcely apprehended or contemplated it, because the every-day life still clung to them. But only to the smallest, inevitable extent. They lived apart; but in the morning she went to him and found him working at his sketch; and she sat down beside him and leant her head on his shoulder; and they thought it out together. He sketched each figure in his procession of women separately and sought for the features and the modelling of the figures: some had the Mongolian aspect of Memmi’s angel of the Annunciation, others Cornélie’s slenderness and her later, fuller wholesomeness; he sought for the folds of the costumes: the women escaped from the violet dusk of the ruined city in pleated pepli; and farther on their garments altered as in a masquerade of the ages: the long trains of the medieval ladies, the veils of the sultanas, the homespun of the workwomen, the caps of the nursing sisters, the attire becoming more modern as the wearer personified a more modern age. And in this grouping the draughtsmanship was so unsubstantial and sober, the transition from drooping folds to practical stiffness so careful and so gradual, that Cornélie hardly perceived the transition, that she appeared to be contemplating one style, one fashion in dress, whereas each figure nevertheless was clad in a different stuff, of different cut, falling into different lines.... The drawing displayed an old-mastery purity, a simplicity of outline, which was nevertheless modern, nervous and morbid, but without the conventional ideal of symbolical human forms; the grouping showed a Raphaelite harmony, the water-colour tints of the first studies the haze of Italy: the ruined city loomed in the dusk as he saw the Forum looming; the city of iron and glass gleamed up with its architecture of light, such as he had seen from Sorrento shining around Naples. She felt that he was creating a great work and had never taken so lively an interest in anything as she now did in his idea and his sketches. She sat behind him silent and still and followed his drawing of the waving banners and fluttering pennants; and she did not breathe when she saw him, with a few dabs of white and touches of light—as though light were one of the colours on his palette—make the glass city emerge as from a dream on the horizon. Then he would ask her something about one of the figures and put his arm around her and draw her to him; and they would long sit scrutinizing and thinking out lines and ideas, until evening fell and the evening chill shuddered through the studio and they rose slowly from their seats. Then they went out and in the Corso they returned to real life: silently, sitting at Aragno’s, they watched the bustle outside; and in their little restaurant, with their eyes absorbing each other’s glance, they ate their simple dinner and looked so obviously and harmoniously happy, that the Italians, the two who also always sat at the far table, at that same hour, smiled as they bowed to them on entering....

CHAPTER XXVII

At the same time Duco developed great powers of work: so much thought dimly took shape before him that he was constantly discovering another motive and symbolizing it in another figure. He sketched a life-size woman walking, with that admixture of child, woman and goddess which characterized his figures, and she walked slowly down a descending line towards a sombre depth, without seeing or understanding; her eyes towards the abyss in magnetic attraction; vague hands hovered around her like a cloud and softly pushed and guided her; on the hill-top, on high rocks, in the bright light, other figures, holding harps, called to her; but she went towards the depth, pushed by hands; in the abyss blossomed strange purple orchids, like mouths of love....

When Cornélie came to his studio one morning, he had suddenly sketched this idea. It came upon her as a surprise, for he had not mentioned it to her: the idea had sprung up suddenly; the quick, spontaneous execution had not taken him an hour. He was almost apologizing to her when he saw her surprise. She certainly admired it, but shuddered at it and preferred The Banners, the great water-colour, the procession of the women marching to the battle of life.

And to please her he put the straying woman aside and worked on solely at the striving women. But constantly a fresh thought came and disturbed him in his work; and in her absence he would sketch some new symbol, until the sketches accumulated and lay spread on every side. She put them away in portfolios; she removed them from easel and board; she saved him from wandering too far from The Banners; and this was the one thing that he completed.

Thus smoothly did their life seem willing to run, along a gracious line, in one golden direction, while his symbols blossomed like flowers on either side, while the azure of their love seemed to form the sky overhead; but she plucked away the superfluous flowers and only The Banners waved above their path, in the firmament of their ecstasy, even as they waved above the militant women.

They had but one distraction, the wedding of the prince and Urania: a dinner, a ball and the ceremony at San Carlo, attended by all the Roman aristocracy, who however welcomed the wealthy American bride with a certain reserve. But, when the Prince and Princess di Forte-Braccio left for Nice, all distraction was at an end; and the days once more glided along the same gracious golden line. And Cornélie retained only one unpleasant recollection: her meeting during those festive days with Mrs. van der Staal, who cut her persistently, turned her back on her and succeeded in conveying to her that the friendship was over. She had accepted the position; she had realized how difficult it was—even if Mrs. van der Staal had been willing to speak to her—to explain to a woman like this, rooted in her social and worldly conventions, her own proud ideas of freedom, independence and happiness. And she had avoided the girls also, understanding that Mrs. van der Staal wished it. She was not angry at all this nor hurt; she could understand it in Duco’s mother: she was only a little sad about it, because she liked Mrs. van der Staal and liked the two girls. But she quite understood: it had to be so; Mrs. van der Staal knew or suspected everything. Duco’s mother could not act differently, though the prince and Urania, for friendship’s sake, overlooked any liaison between Duco and Cornélie; though the Roman world during the wedding-festivities accepted them simply as friends, as acquaintances, as fellow-countrymen, whatever they might whisper, smiling, behind their fans. But now those festivities were over, now they had passed that point of contact with the world and people, now their golden line once more sloped gently and evenly before them....

Then Cornélie, not thinking of the Hague at all, received a letter from the Hague. The letter was from her father and consisted of several sheets, which surprised her, for he never wrote. What she read startled her greatly, but did not at first dishearten her altogether, perhaps because she did not realize the full import of her father’s news. He implored her forgiveness. He had long been in financial difficulties. He had lost a great deal of money. They would have to move into a smaller house. The atmosphere at home was unpleasant: Mamma cried all day; the sisters quarrelled; the family proffered advice; the acquaintances were disagreeable. And he implored her forgiveness. He had speculated and lost. And he had also lost her own little capital, which he managed for her, her godmother’s legacy. He asked her not to think too hardly of him. Things might have turned out differently; and then she would have been three times as well off. He admitted it, he had done wrong; but still he was her father and he asked her, his child, to forgive him and requested her to come home.

She was at first greatly startled, but soon recovered her calmness. She was in too happy a mood of vital harmony to be depressed by the news. She received the letter in bed, did not get up at once, reflected a little, then dressed, breakfasted as usual and went to Duco. He received her with enthusiasm and showed her three new sketches. She reproached him gently for allowing himself to be distracted from his main idea, said that these distractions would exhaust his activity, his perseverance. She urged him to keep on working at The Banners. And she inspected the great water-colour intently, with the ancient, crumbling Forum-like city and the procession of the women towards the metropolis of the future, standing high in the dawn. And suddenly it was borne in upon her that her future also had fallen into ruins and that its crumbling arches hung menacingly over her head. Then she gave him her father’s letter to read. He read it twice, looked at her aghast and asked what she proposed to do. She said that she had already thought it over, but so far decided only upon the most immediate thing to be done: to give up her rooms and come to him in his studio. She had just enough left to pay the rent of her rooms. But, after that, she had no money, no money at all. She had never consented to accept alimony from her husband. All that was still due to her was the payment for her article.

He at once put out his hands to her, kissed her and said that this had been also his idea at once, that she should come to him and live with him. He had enough: a tiny patrimony; he made a little money in addition: there would be enough for the two of them. And they laughed and kissed and glanced round the studio. Duco slept in a small adjoining den, a sort of long wall-cupboard. And they glanced round to see what they could do. Cornélie knew: here, a curtain draped over a cord, with her wash-hand-stand behind it. That was all she needed, only that little corner: otherwise Duco would not have a good light. They were very merry and thought it a jolly, a capital idea. They went out at once, bought a little iron bedstead and a dressing-table and themselves hung up the curtain. Then they both went to pack the trunks in the Via di Serpenti ... and dined at the osteria. Cornélie suggested that they should dine at home now and then: it was cheaper. When they returned home, she was enchanted that her installation took up so little room, hardly six feet by six, with that little bed behind the curtain. They were very cheerful that evening. The bohemianism of it all amused them. They were in Italy, the land of sunshine, of beauty, of lazzaroni, of beggars who slept on the steps of a cathedral; and they felt akin to that sunny poverty. They were happy, they wanted for nothing. They would live on nothing, or at any rate on very little. And they saw the future bright, smiling. They were closer together now, they would live more closely linked together. They loved each other and were happy in a land of beauty, in an ideal of noble symbolism and life-embracing art.

Next morning he worked zealously, without a word, absorbed in his dream, in his work; and she, likewise, silent, contented, happy, examined her blouses and skirts attentively and reflected that she would need nothing more for quite another year and that her old clothes were amply sufficient for their life of happiness and simplicity.

And she answered her father’s letter very briefly, saying that she forgave him, that she was sorry for all of them, but that she was not coming back to the Hague. She would provide for her own maintenance, by writing. Italy was cheap. That was all she wrote. She did not mention Duco. She cut herself off from her family, in thought and in fact. She had met with no sympathy from any of them during her unhappy marriage, during the painful days of her divorce; and now, in her turn, she felt no affection for them. And her happiness made her partial and selfish. She wanted nothing but Duco, nothing but their harmonious life in common. He sat working, laughing to her now and then as she lay on the couch and reflected. She looked at the women marching to battle; she too could not remain lying on a couch, she too would have to sally forth and fight. She foresaw that she would have to fight ... for him. He was at present in the first fine frenzy of his art; but, if this slackened, momentarily, after a result of some kind, after a success for himself and the world, that would be commonplace and logical; and then she would have to fight. He was the noble element in their two lives; his art could never become her bread-winner. His little fortune amounted to hardly anything. She would have liked to work and make money for both of them, so that he need not depart from the pure principle of his art. But how was she to strive, how to work, how to work for their lives and their bread? What could she do? Write? It brought in so little. What else? She was overcome by a slight melancholy, because she could do so little. She possessed minor talents and accomplishments: she wrote a good style, she sang, she played the piano, she could make a blouse and she knew something about cooking. She would herself do the cooking now and then and would make her own clothes. But that was all so small, so little. Strive? Work? In what way? However, she would do what she could. And suddenly she took up a Baedeker, turned over the pages and sat down to write at Duco’s writing-table. She thought for a moment and began a casual article, a travel-picture for a newspaper, about the environs of Naples: that was easier than at once beginning about Rome. And in the studio, filled with a faint warmth of the fire, because the room faced north and was chilly, everything became still and silent, save for the occasional scratching of her pen or the noise made by him when fumbling among his chalks and paint-brushes. She wrote a few pages but could not hit upon an ending. Then she got up; he turned round and smiled at her, with his smile of friendly happiness.

And she read to him what she had written. It was not in the style of her pamphlet. It contained no invective; it was a pleasant traveller’s sketch.

He thought it very nice, but nothing out of the way. But that wasn’t necessary, she said, defending herself. And he kissed her, for her industry and her pluck. It was raining that day and they did not go out for their lunch; there were eggs and tomatoes and she made an omelette on an oil-stove. They drank water, ate quantities of bread. And, while the rain outside lashed the great curtain-less window of the studio, they enjoyed their repast, sitting like two birds that huddle side by side, against each other, so as not to get wet.

CHAPTER XXVIII

It was a couple of months after Easter, in the spring days of May. The flood of tourists had ebbed away immediately after the great church festivities; and Rome was already very hot and growing very quiet. One morning, when Cornélie was crossing the Piazza di Spagna, where the sunshine streamed along the cream-coloured front of the Trinita de’ Monti and down the monumental staircase, where only a few beggars and the very last flower-boy sat dreaming with blinking eye-lids in a shady corner, she saw the prince coming towards her. He bowed to her with a smile of gladness and hastened up to speak to her:

“How glad I am to meet you! I am in Rome for a day or two, on my way to San Stefano, to see my father on business. Business is always a bore; and this is more so than usual. Urania is at Nice. But it is too hot there and we are going away. We have just returned from a trip on the Mediterranean. Four weeks on board a friend’s yacht. It was delightful! Why did you never come to see us at Nice, as Urania asked you to?”

“I really wasn’t able to come.”

“I went to call on you yesterday in the Via dei Serpenti. They told me you had moved.”

He looked at her with a touch of mocking laughter in his small, glittering eyes. She did not speak.

“After that I did not like to commit a further indiscretion,” he said, meaningly. “Where are you going?”

“To the post-office.”

“May I come with you? Isn’t it too hot for walking?”

“Oh, no, I love the heat! Come by all means, if you like. How is Urania?”

“Very well, capital. She’s capital. She’s splendid, simply splendid. I should never have thought it. I should never have dared to think it. She plays her part to perfection. So far as she is concerned, I don’t regret my marriage. But, for the rest, Gesu mio, what a disappointment, what a disillusion!”

“Why?”

“You knew, did you not—I even now don’t know how—you knew for how many millions I sold myself? Not five millions but ten millions. Ah, signora mia, what a take in! You saw my father-in-law at the time of our wedding. What a Yankee, what a stocking-merchant and what a tradesman! We’re no match for him: I, Papa, or the marchesa. First promises, contracts: oh, rather! But then haggling here, haggling there. We’re no good at that: neither Papa nor I. Aunt alone was able to haggle. But she was no match for the stocking-merchant. She had not learnt that, in all the years during which she kept a boarding-house. Ten millions? Five millions? Not three millions! Or yes, perhaps we did get something like that, plus a heap of promises, for our children’s children, when everybody’s dead. Ah, signora, signora, I was better off before I was married! True, I had debts then and not now. But Urania is so economical, so practical! I should never have thought it of her. It has been a disappointment to everybody: Papa, my aunt, the monsignori. You should have seen them together. They could have scratched one another’s eyes out. Papa almost had a stroke, my aunt nearly came to blows with the monsignori.... Ah, signora, signora, I don’t like it! I am a victim. Winter after winter, they angled with me. But I didn’t want to be the bait, I struggled, I wouldn’t let the fish bite. And then this came of it. Not three millions. Lire, not dollars. I was so stupid, I thought at first it would be dollars. And Urania’s economy! She allows me my pocket-money. She controls everything, does everything. She knows exactly how much I lose at the club. Yes, you may laugh, but it’s sad. Don’t you see that I sometimes feel as if I could cry? And she has such queer notions. For instance, we have our flat at Nice and we keep on my rooms in the Palazzo Ruspoli, as a pied-à-terre in Rome. That’s enough: we don’t come often to Rome, because we are ‘black’ and Urania thinks it dull. In the summer, we were to go here or there, to some watering-place. That was all right, that was settled. But now Urania suddenly conceives the notion of selecting San Stefano as a summer residence. San Stefano! I ask you! I shall never be able to stand it. True, it’s high up, it’s cool: it’s a pleasant climate, good, fresh mountain air. But I need more in my life than mountain air. I can’t live on mountain air. Oh, you wouldn’t know Urania! She can be so awfully obstinate. It’s settled now, beyond recall: in the summer, San Stefano. And the worst of it is that she has won Papa’s heart by it. I have to suffer. They’re two to one against me. And the worst of it is that Urania says we shall have to be very economical, in order to do San Stefano up a bit. It’s a famous historical place, but fallen into grisly disrepair. It’s not our fault: we never had any luck. There was once a Forte-Braccio pope; after that our star declined and we never had another stroke of luck again. San Stefano is the type of ruined greatness. You ought to see the place. To economize, to renovate San Stefano! That’s Urania’s ideal. She has taken it into her head to do that honour to our ancestral abode. However, she has won Papa’s heart by it and he has recovered from his stroke. But can you understand now that il povero Gilio is poorer than he was before he acquired shares in a Chicago stocking-factory?”

There was no checking his flow of words. He felt profoundly unhappy, small, beaten, tamed, conquered, destroyed; and he had a need to ease his heart. They had passed the post-office and now retraced their steps. He looked for sympathy from Cornélie and found it in the smiling attention with which she listened to his grievances. She replied that, after all, it showed that Urania had a real feeling for San Stefano.

“Oh, yes!” he admitted, humbly. “She is very good. I should never have thought it. She is every inch a princess and duchess. It’s splendid. But the ten millions: gone, an illusion!... But tell me: how well you’re looking! Each time I see you, you’ve grown lovelier and lovelier. Do you know that you’re a very lovely woman? You must be very happy, I’m certain! You’re an exceptional woman, I always said so. I don’t understand you.... May I speak frankly? Are we good friends, you and I? I don’t understand. I think what you have done such a terrible thing. I have never heard of anything like it in our world.”

“I don’t live in your world, prince.”

“Very well, but all the same your world must have much the same ideas about it. And the calmness, the pride, the happiness with which you do, just quietly, as you please! I think it perfectly awful. I stand aghast at it.... And yet ... it’s a pity. People in my world are very easy-going. But that sort of thing is not allowed!”

“Prince, once more, I have no world. My world is my own sphere.”

“I don’t understand that. Tell me, how am I to tell Urania? For I should think it delightful if you would come and stay at San Stefano. Oh, do come, do: come to keep us company. I entreat you. Be charitable, do a good work.... But first tell me, how shall I tell Urania?”

She laughed:

“What?”

“What they told me in the Via dei Serpenti, that your address was now Signor van der Staal’s studio, Via del Babuino.”

Laughing, she looked at him almost pityingly:

“It is too difficult for you to tell her,” she replied, a little condescendingly. “I will myself write to Urania and explain my conduct.”

He was evidently relieved:

“That’s delightful, capital! And ... will you come to San Stefano?”

“No, I can’t really.”

“Why not?”

“I can no longer move in the circle in which you live, after my change of address,” she said, half laughing, half seriously.

He shrugged his shoulders:

“Listen,” he said. “You know our Roman society. So long as certain conventions are observed ... everything’s permitted.”

“Exactly; but it’s just those conventions which I don’t observe.”

“And that’s where you are wrong. Believe me, I am saying it as your friend.”

“I live according to my own laws and I don’t want to move in your world.”

He folded his hands in entreaty:

“Yes, yes, I know. You are a ‘new woman.’ You have your own laws. But I beseech you, take pity on me. Be an angel of mercy and come to San Stefano.”

She seemed to hear a note of seduction in his voice and therefore said:

“Prince, even if it agreed with the conventions of your world ... even then I shouldn’t wish to. For I will not leave Van der Staal.”

“You come first and let him come a little later. Urania will be glad to have his advice on some artistic questions, concerning the ‘doing up’ of San Stefano. We have a lot of pictures there. And old things generally. Do let’s arrange that. I am going to San Stefano to-morrow. Urania will follow me in a week. I will suggest to her to ask you down soon.”

“Really, prince ... it can’t happen just yet.”

“Why not?”

She looked at him for some time before answering:

“Shall I be candid with you?”

“But of course!”

They had already passed the post-office twice. The street was quite silent and deserted. He looked at her enquiringly.

“Well, then,” she said, “we are in great financial difficulties. We have no money at present. I have lost my little capital; and the small sum which I earned by writing an article is spent. Duco is working hard, but he is engaged on a big work and making nothing in the meantime. He expects to receive a bit of money in a month or so. But at the moment we have nothing, nothing at all. That is why I went to a shop by the Tiber this morning to ask how much a dealer would give for a couple of old pictures which Duco wants to sell. He doesn’t like parting with them, but there’s no help for it. So you see that I can’t come. I should not care to leave him; besides, I should not have the money for the journey or a decent wardrobe.”

He looked at her. The first thing that he had noticed was her new and blooming loveliness; now he noticed that her skirt was a little worn and her blouse none too fresh, though she wore a couple of roses in the waist-band.

“Gesu mio!” he exclaimed. “And you tell me that so calmly, so quietly!”

She smiled and shrugged her shoulders:

“What would you have me do? Moan and groan about it?”

“But you are a woman ... a woman to revere and respect!” he cried. “How does Van der Staal take it?”

“He is a bit depressed, of course. He has never known money trouble. And it hinders him from employing his full talent. But I hope to help him bear up during this difficult time. So you see, prince, that I can’t come to San Stefano.”

“But why didn’t you write to us? Why not ask us for money?”

“It is very nice of you to say that, but the idea never even occurred to us.”

“Too proud?”

“Yes, too proud.”

“But what a position to be in! What can I do for you? May I give you two hundred lire? I have two hundred lire on me. And I will tell Urania that I gave it to you.”

“No, thank you, prince. I am very grateful to you, but I can’t accept it.”

“Not from me?”

“No.”

“Not from Urania?”

“Not from her either.”

“Why not?”

“I want to earn my money and I can’t accept alms.”

“A fine principle. But for the moment ...”

“I remain true to it.”

“Will you allow me to tell you something?”

“What?”

“I admire you. More than that: I love you.”

She made a gesture with her hand and wrinkled her brows.

“Why mayn’t I tell you so? An Italian does not keep his love concealed. I love you. You are more beautiful and nobler and superior to anything that I could ever imagine any woman to be.... Don’t be angry with me: I am not asking anything of you. I am a bad lot, but at this moment I really feel the sort of thing that you see in our old family-portraits, an atom of chivalry which has survived by accident. I ask for nothing from you. I merely tell you—and I say it in Urania’s name as well as my own—that you can always rely on us. Urania will be angry that you haven’t written to us.”

They now entered the post-office and she bought a few stamps:

“There go my last soldi,” she said, laughing and showing her empty purse. “We wanted the stamps to write to the secretary of an exhibition in London. Are you seeing me home?”

She saw suddenly that he had tears in his eyes.

“Do accept two hundred lire from me!” he entreated.

She smilingly shook her head.

“Are you dining at home?” he asked.

She gave him a quizzing look:

“Yes,” she said.

He was unwilling to ask any further questions, was afraid lest he should wound her:

“Be kind,” he said, “and dine with me this evening. I’m bored. I have no friends in Rome at the moment. Everybody is away. Not at the Grand-Hôtel, but in a snug little restaurant, where they know me. I’ll come and fetch you at seven o’clock. Do be nice and come! For my sake!”

He could not restrain his tears.

“I shall be delighted,” she said, softly, with her smile.

They were standing in the porch of the house in the Via del Babuino where the studio was. He raised her hand to his lips and pressed a fervent kiss upon it. Then he took off his hat and hurried away. She went slowly up the stairs, mastering her emotion before she entered the studio.

CHAPTER XXIX

She found Duco lying listlessly on the sofa. He had a bad headache and she sat down beside him.

“Well?” he asked.

“The man offered me eighty lire for the Memmo,” she said, “but he declared that the panel was not by Gentile da Fabriano: he remembered having seen it here.”