ffect to destroy
their ancient amity. This was no less than the composition of those
wedding-verses, without which, printed and exposed to view in all the
shop-windows, no one in Venice feels himself adequately and truly
married. Pennellini had never willingly made a verse in his life; and
it was long before he understood Tonelli, when he urged the delicate
request. Then in vain he protested, recalcitrated. It was all an offence
to Tonelli's morbid soul, already irritated by his friend's obtuseness,
and eager to turn even the reluctance of nature into insult. He took his
refusal for a sign that he, too, deserted him; and must be called back,
after bidding Pennellini adieu, to hear the only condition on which the
accursed sonnet would be furnished, namely, that it should not be signed
Pennellini, but An Affectionate Friend. Never was sonnet cost poet so
great anguish as this: Pennellini went at it conscientiously as if it
were a problem in mathematics; he refreshed his prosody, he turned over
Carrer, he toiled a whole night, and in due time appeared as Tonelli's
affectionate friend in all the butchers' and bakers' windows. But it had
been too much to ask of him, and for a while he felt the shock of
Tonelli's unreason and excess so much that there was a decided coolness
between them.

This important particular arranged, little remained for Tonelli to do
but to come to that open understanding with the Paronsina and her mother
which he had long dreaded and avoided. He could not conceal from himself
that his marriage was a kind of desertion of the two dear friends so
dependent upon his singleness, and he considered the case of the
Paronsina with a real remorse. If his meditated act sometimes appeared
to him a gross inconsistency and a satire upon all his former life, he
had still consoled himself with the truth of his passion, and had found
love its own apology and comfort; but in its relation to these lonely
women, his love itself had no fairer aspect than that of treason, and he
shrank from owning it before them with a sense of guilt. Some wild
dreams of reconciling his future with his past occasionally haunted him;
but in his saner moments, he perceived their folly. Carlotta, he knew,
was good and patient, but she was nevertheless a woman, and she would
never consent that he should be to the Cenarotti all that he had been;
these ladies also were very kind and reasonable, but they too were
women, and incapable of accepting