or the sake of concealing
his love, would not allow himself any argument in extenuation of what he
had done. He had had but very few affairs of the heart in his life, and
they had been for the most part very insignificant, and his experience
was limited. Even now it never entered his mind to imagine that Corona
would condone his offence; he felt sure that she was deeply wounded, and
that his next meeting with her would be a terrible ordeal--so terrible,
indeed, that he doubted whether he had the courage to meet her at all.
His love was so great, and its object so sacred to him, that he hesitated
to conceive himself loved in return; perhaps if he had been able to
understand that Corona loved him he would have left Rome for ever, rather
than trouble her peace by his presence.
It would have been absolutely different if he had been paying court to
Donna Tullia, for instance. The feeling that he should be justified would
have lent him courage, and the coldness in his own heart would have left
his judgment free play. He could have watched her calmly, and would have
tried to take advantage of every mood in the prosecution of his suit. He
was a very honourable man, but he did not consider marriages of propriety
and convenience as being at all contrary to the ordinary standard of
social honour, and would have thought himself justified in using every
means of persuasion in order to win a woman whom, upon mature reflection,
he had judged suitable to become his wife, even though he felt no real
love for her. That is an idea inherent in most old countries, an idea for
which Giovanni Saracinesca was certainly in no way responsible, seeing
that it had been instilled into him from his boyhood. Personally he would
have preferred to live and die unmarried, rather than to take a wife as a
matter of obligation towards his family; but seeing that he had never
seriously loved any woman, he had acquired the habit of contemplating
such a marriage as a probability, perhaps as an ultimate necessity, to
be put off as long as possible, but to which he would at last yield with
a good grace.
But the current of his life had been turned. He was certainly not a
romantic character, not a man who desired to experience the external
sensations to be obtained by voluntarily creating dramatic events. He
loved action, and he had a taste for danger, but he had sought both in
a legitimate way; he never desired to implicate himself in adventures
where the fee
|