edetta violently interrupted him: "I! I! Ah! you do not know me; I
would rather die!" And with extraordinary exaltation, all aglow with
love, as if her superstitious faith had fired her passion to ecstasy, she
continued: "I have vowed to the Madonna that I will belong to none but
the man I love, and to him only when he is my husband. And hitherto I
have kept that vow, at the cost of my happiness, and I will keep it
still, even if it cost me my life! Yes, we will die, my poor Dario and I,
if it be necessary; but the holy Virgin has my vow, and the angels shall
not weep in heaven!"

She was all in those words, her nature all simplicity, intricate,
inexplicable though it might seem. She was doubtless swayed by that idea
of human nobility which Christianity has set in renunciation and purity;
a protest, as it were, against eternal matter, against the forces of
Nature, the everlasting fruitfulness of life. But there was more than
this; she reserved herself, like a divine and priceless gift, to be
bestowed on the one being whom her heart had chosen, he who would be her
lord and master when God should have united them in marriage. For her
everything lay in the blessing of the priest, in the religious
solemnisation of matrimony. And thus one understood her long resistance
to Prada, whom she did not love, and her despairing, grievous resistance
to Dario, whom she did love, but who was not her husband. And how
torturing it was for that soul of fire to have to resist her love; how
continual was the combat waged by duty in the Virgin's name against the
wild, passionate blood of her race! Ignorant, indolent though she might
be, she was capable of great fidelity of heart, and, moreover, she was
not given to dreaming: love might have its immaterial charms, but she
desired it complete.

As Pierre looked at her in the dying twilight he seemed to see and
understand her for the first time. The duality of her nature appeared in
her somewhat full, fleshy lips, in her big black eyes, which suggested a
dark, tempestuous night illumined by flashes of lightning, and in the
calm, sensible expression of the rest of her gentle, infantile face. And,
withal, behind those eyes of flame, beneath that pure, candid skin, one
divined the internal tension of a superstitious, proud, and self-willed
woman, who was obstinately intent on reserving herself for her one love.
And Pierre could well understand that she should be adored, that she
should fill the l