aughty and overbearing
mistress, with whom you have struggled for him to this day.

"Once, for an instant, you had a vision of happiness. Paolo, tumbling
from the lofty sphere where his spirit was constantly soaring, was
amazed to find reality so sweet; you fancied that his madness would be
lulled in the arms of love. But before long Music again clutched
her prey. The dazzling mirage which had cheated you into the joys of
reciprocal love made the lonely path on which you had started look more
desolate and barren.

"In the tale your husband has just told me, I could read, as plainly as
in the contrast between your looks and his, all the painful secrets of
that ill-assorted union, in which you have accepted the sufferer's part.
Though your conduct has been unfailingly heroical, though your firmness
has never once given way in the exercise of your painful duties,
perhaps, in the silence of lonely nights, the heart that at this moment
is beating so wildly in your breast, may, from time to time, have
rebelled. Your husband's superiority was in itself your worst torment.
If he had been less noble, less single-minded, you might have deserted
him; but his virtues upheld yours; you wondered, perhaps, whether his
heroism or your own would be the first to give way.

"You clung to your really magnanimous task as Paolo clung to his
chimera. If you had had nothing but a devotion to duty to guide and
sustain you, triumph might have seemed easier; you would only have
had to crush your heart, and transfer your life into the world of
abstractions; religion would have absorbed all else, and you would have
lived for an idea, like those saintly women who kill all the instincts
of nature at the foot of the altar. But the all-pervading charm of
Paolo, the loftiness of his mind, his rare and touching proofs of
tenderness, constantly drag you down from that ideal realm where virtue
would fain maintain you; they perennially revive in you the energies
you have exhausted in contending with the phantom of love. You never
suspected this! The faintest glimmer of hope led you on in pursuit of
the sweet vision.

"At last the disappointments of many years have undermined your
patience,--an angel would have lost it long since,--and now the
apparition so long pursued is no more than a shade without substance.
Madness that is so nearly allied to genius can know no cure in this
world. When this thought first struck you, you looked back on your
past you