it was to make the
first, when the shameful suspicion cruelly attached to her had helped to
balance her steps with rebellious pride; and more, the great collected
wave of her ambitious years of girlhood had cast her forward to the
spot, as in a last effort for consummation. Now that she had won the
public voice (love, her heart called it) her eyes looked inward; she
meditated upon what she had to do, and coughed nervously. She frightened
herself with her coughing, and shivered at the prospect of again going
forward in the great nakedness of stagelights and thirsting eyes. And,
moreover, she was not strengthened by the character of the music and the
poetry of the second Act:--a knowledge of its somewhat inferior quality
may possibly have been at the root of Agostino's dread of an anticlimax.
The seconda donna had the chief part in it--notably an aria (Rocco had
given it to her in compassion) that suited Irma's pure shrieks and the
tragic skeleton she could be. Vittoria knew how low she was sinking when
she found her soul in the shallows of a sort of jealousy of Irma. For a
little space she lost all intimacy with herself; she looked at her face
in the glass and swallowed water, thinking that she had strained a dream
and confused her brain with it. The silence of her solitary room coming
upon the blaze of light the colour and clamour of the house, and the
strange remembrance of the recent impersonation of an ideal character,
smote her with the sense of her having fallen from a mighty eminence,
and that she lay in the dust. All those incense-breathing flowers heaped
on her table seemed poisonous, and reproached her as a delusion. She sat
crouching alone till her tirewomen called; horrible talkative things!
her own familiar maid Giacinta being the worst to bear with.

Now, Michiella, by making love to Leonardo, Camillo's associate,
discovers that Camillo is conspiring against her father. She utters to
Leonardo very pleasant promises indeed, if he will betray his friend.
Leonardo, a wavering baritono, complains that love should ask for
any return save in the coin of the empire of love. He is seduced, and
invokes a malediction upon his head should he accomplish what he has
sworn to perform. Camilla reposes perfect confidence in this wretch, and
brings her more doubtful husband to be of her mind.

Camillo and Camilla agree to wear the mask of a dissipated couple.
They throw their mansion open; dicing, betting, intriguing, revel