enough for him to feel that if he had
suddenly taken me by the throat and strangled me slowly, _avec delices_,
I could forgive him while I choked. How correct he was! But bitterness
against me peeped out of every second phrase. At last I raised my hand
and said to him, 'Enough.' I believe he was shocked by my plebeian
abruptness but he was too polite to show it. His conventions will always
stand in the way of his nature. I told him that everything that had been
said and done during the last seven or eight months was inexplicable
unless on the assumption that he was in love with me,--and yet in
everything there was an implication that he couldn't forgive me my very
existence. I did ask him whether he didn't think that it was absurd on
his part . . . "

"Didn't you say that it was exquisitely absurd?" I asked.

"Exquisitely! . . . " Dona Rita was surprised at my question. "No. Why
should I say that?"

"It would have reconciled him to your abruptness. It's their family
expression. It would have come with a familiar sound and would have been
less offensive."

"Offensive," Dona Rita repeated earnestly. "I don't think he was
offended; he suffered in another way, but I didn't care for that. It was
I that had become offended in the end, without spite, you understand, but
past bearing. I didn't spare him. I told him plainly that to want a
woman formed in mind and body, mistress of herself, free in her choice,
independent in her thoughts; to love her apparently for what she is and
at the same time to demand from her the candour and the innocence that
could be only a shocking pretence; to know her such as life had made her
and at the same time to despise her secretly for every touch with which
her life had fashioned her--that was neither generous nor high minded; it
was positively frantic. He got up and went away to lean against the
mantelpiece, there, on his elbow and with his head in his hand. You have
no idea of the charm and the distinction of his pose. I couldn't help
admiring him: the expression, the grace, the fatal suggestion of his
immobility. Oh, yes, I am sensible to aesthetic impressions, I have been
educated to believe that there is a soul in them."

With that enigmatic, under the eyebrows glance fixed on me she laughed
her deep contralto laugh without mirth but also without irony, and
profoundly moving by the mere purity of the sound.

"I suspect he was never so disgusted and appalled in his