in line and colouring that the poet stood a
moment lost in pure aesthetic pleasure and admiration.

But the next moment the old obscure sense of jealousy was upon him once
more. The fragile little creature clinging to the mother, indissolubly
connected with her mother's very being, seemed to him an enemy, an
insurmountable obstacle rising up against his love, his desires, his
hopes. He was not jealous of the husband, but he was of the daughter. It
was not the body but the soul of this woman that he longed to possess,
and to possess it wholly, undivided, with all its tenderness, all its
joys, its hopes, its fears, its pain, its dreams--in short the sum total
of her spiritual being, and be able to say--'I am the life of her life.'

But instead, it was the daughter who possessed all this incontestably,
absolutely, continuously. When her idol left her side, even for a short
time, the mother seemed to miss some essential element of her existence.
Her face was instantaneously and visibly transfigured when, after a
brief absence, that childish voice fell upon her ear once more. At
times, unconsciously and as if by some occult correspondence, some law
of common vital accordance, she would repeat a gesture of the child's, a
smile, an attitude, a pose of the head. Again, when the child was in
repose or asleep, she had moments of contemplation so intense that she
seemed to have lost all sense of her surroundings and to have absorbed
herself into the creature she was contemplating. When she spoke to her
darling, every word was a caress, and the plaintive lines vanished from
her mouth. Under the child's kisses, her lips quivered and her eyes
filled with ineffable happiness like the eyes of an ecstatic at a
beatific vision. If she happened to be conversing with other people or
listening to their talk, she would appear to have sudden lapses of
attention, momentary absence of mind, and this was for her daughter--for
her--always for her.

Who could ever break that chain? Could any one ever succeed in
conquering a part--even the very smallest atom of that heart? Andrea
suffered as under an irreparable loss, some forced renunciation, some
shattered hope. At this moment, this very moment, was not the child
stealing something from him?

For Delfina was playfully constraining her mother to remain upon her
knees. She hung with all her weight round Donna Maria's neck, crying
through her laughter--

'No--no--no--you shall not get up!'