rather deficient in sensitiveness;
indifferent, light-hearted, in her girlhood; not rebelling against the
frightful negativeness of existence, the want of love, of youth, of
brightness, of all that a young girl can want in the early part of her
married life; not rebelling against the positive miseries, the constant
presence of everything that was mentally and physically loathsome in the
second period of this wedded slavery; a woman of cold temperament, and
even, you might say, of cold heart, and safe, safe in the routine of
duty and suffering, until a merely intellectual flame burst out, white
and cold, in her hitherto callous nature. A creature, so to speak, only
half awake, or awake, perhaps, only when she devoured her books and
tried to puzzle out her mathematical problems; and going through life by
the side of her jealous, brutal, sickly, drunken husband, in a kind of
somnambulistic indifferentism, perhaps not feeling her miseries very
acutely, and probably not envying other women their meaningless liberty,
their inane lovers, their empty wholeness of life.

Thus the routine continued. The Count and Countess of Albany, cured
by this time of any affectation of royalty, had gradually got
domesticated in Florentine society. People began to go to their house,
the newly-bought palace in Via San Sebastiano. People came to the
opera-box where Charles Edward lay stretched, dozing or snoring, his
bottle of Cyprus wine by his side, on his sofa. It is easy to read
through the lines of Sir Horace Mann's pages of social tittle-tattle,
that Florence, frivolous and unintellectual and corrupt though it was,
and, perhaps, almost in proportion to its frivolity, emptiness, and
corruption, felt a strange sort of interest, experienced a vague, mixed
feeling, pity, fear, and general surprise and want of comprehension
towards this beautiful young woman, with her dazzling white complexion,
dark hazel eyes and blonde hair, her childish features grown, perhaps
not less young, but more serious and solemn for her five years of wasted
youth and endured misery, with her reputation for coldness, her almost
legendary eccentricities of intellectual interests. Women like this one
are apt to be regarded not so much with dislike and envy, as with the
mixed awe and pity which peasants feel towards an idiot, by frivolous
and immoral people like those powdered Florentines of a hundred years
ago, whose brocaded trains and embroidered coats have long since