"He was too young to smile and save himself;"

--for she does not dream, not then remembering the "money" which was at
the heart of all her woe, that _he_ would have been spared for that
money's sake. . . . But she had not seen him again, and now will never
see him. And when he grows up and comes to be her age, he will ask what
his mother was like, and people will say, "Like girls of seventeen," and
he will think of some girl he knows who titters and blushes when he
looks at her. . . . That is not the way for a mother!

"Therefore I wish someone will please to say
I looked already old, though I was young;"

--and she begs to be told that she looks "nearer twenty." Her name too
is not a common one--that may help to keep apart

"A little the thing I am from what girls are."

But how hard for him to find out anything about her:

"No father that he ever knew at all,
Nor never had--no, never had, I say!"

--and a mother who only lived two weeks, and Pietro and Violante gone!
Only his saint to guard him--that was why she chose the new one; _he_
would not be tired of guarding namesakes. . . . After all, she hopes her
boy will come to disbelieve her history, as herself almost does. It is
dwindling fast to that:

"Sheer dreaming and impossibility--
Just in four days too! All the seventeen years,
Not once did a suspicion visit me
How very different a lot is mine
From any other woman's in the world.
The reason must be, 'twas by step and step
It got to grow so terrible and strange.
These strange woes stole on tip-toe, as it were . . .
Sat down where I sat, laid them where I lay,
And I was found familiarised with fear."

First there was the amazement of finding herself disowned by Pietro and
Violante. Then:

"So with my husband--just such a surprise,
Such a mistake, in that relationship!
Everyone says that husbands love their wives,
Guard them and guide them, give them happiness;
'Tis duty, law, pleasure, religion: well--
You see how much of this comes true with me!"

Next, "there is the friend." . . . People will not ask her about him;
they smile and give him nicknames, and call him her lover. "Most
surprise of all!" It is always that word: how he loves her, how she
loves him . . . yet he is a priest, and she is married. It all seems
unreal, like the childish game in which she and her little friend Tisbe