ld not have occurred at a more appropriate
time for a disaster, or at a time when its victims were less able to
bear it I do not know whether I have yet sufficiently indicated the
fact, but the truth is both the Paronsina and her mother had from long
use come to regard Tonelli as a kind of property of theirs, which had
no right in any way to alienate itself. They would have felt an attempt
of this sort to be not only very absurd, but very wicked, in view of
their affection for him and dependence upon him; and while the Paronsina
thanked God that he would never marry, she had a deep conviction that he
ought not to marry, even if he desired. It was at the same time
perfectly natural, nay, filial, that she should herself be ready to
desert this old friend, whom she felt so strictly bound to be faithful
to her loneliness. As matters fell out, she had herself primarily to
blame for Tonelli's loss; for, in that interval of disgust and ennui
following the Doctor's dismissal, she had suffered him to seek his own
pleasure on holiday evenings; and he had thus wandered alone to the
Piazza, and so, one night, had seen a lady eating an ice there, and
fallen in love without more ado than another man should drink a
lemonade.

This facility came of habit, for Tonelli had now been falling in love
every other day for some forty years; and in that time had broken the
hearts of innumerable women of all nations and classes. The prettiest
water-carriers in his neighborhood were in love with him, as their
mothers had been before them, and ladies of noble condition were
believed to cherish passions for him. Especially, gay and beautiful
foreigners, as they sat at Florian's, were taken with hopeless love of
him; and he could tell stories of very romantic adventure in which he
figured as hero, though nearly always with moral effect. For example,
there was the countess from the mainland,--she merited the sad
distinction of being chief among those who had vainly loved him, if you
could believe the poet who both inspired and sang her passion. When she
took a palace in Venice, he had been summoned to her on the pretended
business of a secretary; but when she presented herself with those idle
accounts of her factor and tenants on the mainland, her household
expenses and her correspondence with her advocate, Tonelli perceived at
once that it was upon a wholly different affair that she had desired to
see him. She was a rich widow of forty, of a beauty