ork in the back streets, music, acting,
hunting; given them up one after the other; taken to them passionately
again. They had served in the past. But this year they had not
served.... One Sunday, coming from confession unconfessed, she had faced
herself. It was wicked. She would have to kill this feeling--must fly
from this boy who moved her so! If she did not act quickly, she would
be swept away. And then the thought had come: Why not? Life was to be
lived--not torpidly dozed through in this queer cultured place, where
age was in the blood! Life was for love--to be enjoyed! And she would
be thirty-six next month! It seemed to her already an enormous age.
Thirty-six! Soon she would be old, actually old--and never have known
passion! The worship, which had made a hero of the distinguished-looking
Englishman, twelve years older than herself, who could lead up the
Cimone della Pala, had not been passion. It might, perhaps, have become
passion if he had so willed. But he was all form, ice, books. Had he a
heart at all, had he blood in his veins? Was there any joy of life in
this too beautiful city and these people who lived in it--this place
where even enthusiasms seemed to be formal and have no wings, where
everything was settled and sophisticated as the very chapels and
cloisters? And yet, to have this feeling for a boy--for one almost young
enough to be her son! It was so--shameless! That thought haunted her,
made her flush in the dark, lying awake at night. And desperately she
would pray--for she was devout--pray to be made pure, to be given the
holy feelings of a mother, to be filled simply with the sweet sense that
she could do everything, suffer anything for him, for his good. After
these long prayers she would feel calmed, drowsy, as though she had
taken a drug. For hours, perhaps, she would stay like that. And then it
would all come over her again. She never thought of his loving her; that
would be--unnatural. Why should he love her? She was very humble about
it. Ever since that Sunday, when she avoided the confessional, she had
brooded over how to make an end--how to get away from a longing that
was too strong for her. And she had hit on this plan--to beg for the
mountains, to go back to where her husband had come into her life, and
try if this feeling would not die. If it did not, she would ask to be
left out there with her own people, away from this danger. And now the
fool--the blind fool--the superior fool--wit