ties, and wounded self-esteem only gives place to anger.

I sat down on the front seat and coldly asked the mother why she had not
come up to supper with us. When the carriage stopped at their door, she
asked me to come in, but I told her I would rather not. I felt that for a
little more I would have boxed her ears, and the man at the house door
looked very like a cut-throat.

I felt enraged and excited physically as well as mentally, and though I
had never been to see the Corticelli, told the coachman to drive there
immediately, as I felt sure of finding her well disposed. Everybody was
gone to bed. I knocked at the door till I got an answer, I gave my name,
and I was let in, everything being in total darkness. The mother told me
she would light a candle, and that if she had expected me she would have
waited up in spite of the cold. I felt as if I were in the middle of an
iceberg. I heard the girl laughing, and going up to the bed and passing
my hand over it I came across some plain tokens of the masculine gender.
I had got hold of her brother. In the meanwhile the mother had got a
candle, and I saw the girl with the bedclothes up to her chin, for, like
her brother, she was as naked as my hand. Although no Puritan, I was
shocked.

"Why do you allow this horrible union?" I said to the mother.

"What harm is there? They are brother and sister."

"That's just what makes it a criminal matter."

"Everything is perfectly innocent."

"Possibly; but it's not a good plan."

The pathic escaped from the bed and crept into his mother's, while the
little wanton told me there was really no harm, as they only loved each
other as brother and sister, and that if I wanted her to sleep by herself
all I had to do was to get her a new bed. This speech, delivered with
arch simplicity, in her Bolognese jargon, made me laugh with all my
heart, for in the violence of her gesticulations she had disclosed half
her charms, and I saw nothing worth looking at. In spite of that, it was
doubtless decreed that I should fall in love with her skin, for that was
all she had.

If I had been alone I should have brought matters to a crisis on the
spot, but I had a distaste to the presence of her mother and her
scoundrelly brother. I was afraid lest some unpleasant scenes might
follow. I gave her ten ducats to buy a bed, said good night, and left the
house. I returned to my lodging, cursing the too scrupulous mothers of
the opera girls.

I passed