Better now than later! At your age, unhappiness is
easily borne--it is only what the sporting gentlemen call a preliminary
canter. Wait till you come to the actual race!"

"I am not fit to dwell with others--with grave, earnest men; I am too
nervous and impressionable."

"Because you come of an excitable race, and your childhood was passed in
too deep poverty. You will grow out of all that, gradually. Stay here;
oh, keep with me, for I have need of you and you require a
companion-soul, soothing like mine. The kind of disappointment you
experience is not to be cured by change of place. You carry it with you,
and distance increases and strengthens it, and whenever you meet the
object again to whom was due the vexation you will perceive that you
went on the journey for no good."

Antonino looked at the speaker as one regards the mind-reader who has
answered to the point. Clemenceau fixed him with his serene, unvarying
eyes, and continued, in an emotionless voice, like a statue, speaking:

"You are in love--and you love my wife."

Antonino started away and involuntarily lifted his hands in a position
of defense. Averting his eyes and unclenching his fists, he muttered
sullenly:

"What makes you suppose that?"

"I saw it was so."

At the end of a silence more burdensome than any before the younger man
found his voice and, as though tears interfered with his utterance,
said pathetically, and indistinctly:

"Do you not acknowledge, master, now, that I must go; for when I am far
away, perhaps you will forgive the ingrate!"

Looking at the young man of two-and-twenty, Clemenceau knew by his own
infatuation at the same tender age with the same woman, that he had
nothing to forgive him for--little to reproach him. It was youth that
was to blame, and it had loved. No matter who that Cytherean priestess
was, he must have adored her whether sister, wife or daughter of dearest
friend, teacher and paternal patron. But it was clear from the grief
that had made the youth a melancholy man that he was honorable.

Grief is never, when the outcome of remorse, a useless or evil feeling.
It is a fair-fighting adversary which has only to be overcome to be a
sure ally, always ready to defend and protect its victor. In his own
terse language, that of a mathematician and mechanician who knew no
words of double meaning.

Clemenceau told the Italian this.

"With your youth and your grief, such a spirit as yours and such a
friend as