man: a
handsome and highly respectable marriage with a girl twenty years his
junior, fresh from the convent, provided with the right number of
heraldic quarterings, acres, diamonds, and domestic virtues, and who
would bear him, in deep awe for his unapproachable superiority, five or
six robust children; and a romantic connexion with a married woman or a
widow, a woman all passion and intellect and aspiration, with whom he
should go through a course of mutual soul improvement, who should be the
sharer of all his higher life, and whom he would diligently deck out as
a Beatrice or a Laura in the eyes of society.

The Countess of Albany did not fit into the first ideal; nor, for the
matter of that, did Alfieri, poor, expatriated, mad for independence,
engrossed in literature, fit into it himself; and both, as it happened,
fitted in perfectly to the second ideal possibility. To get married with
a view to turning into domestic beings, would be a failure, a trouble,
an interruption, a desecration, and a bore; to get married merely to go
on as they were at present, would, in the eyes of Alfieri, have been a
profanation of the poetry of their situation, a perfectly unnecessary
piece of humbug.

Such were, doubtless, Alfieri's views of the case. Mme. d'Albany, on
the other hand, had evidently no vocation as a housewife or a mother;
marriage was full of disagreeable associations to her: a husband
might beat one, and a lover might not. She, probably, also, guessed
instinctively that to Alfieri a Laura must always be a mere mistress,
and a wife must always be a mere Griselda; she knew his cut-and-dry
views, his frightful power of carrying theory into practice; she may
have guessed that the most respectful of lovers would in his case make
the most tyrannical of husbands. But while Alfieri doubtless brought
Mme. d'Albany to share his abstract reasons, Mme. d'Albany probably
brought home to him her own more practical ones. Alfieri, we must
remember, had been a man of excessive social vanity; and much as he
despised mankind, he certainly still liked to enjoy its admiring
consideration. Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, had been brought up in
the full worldliness of a canoness of Ste. Wandru, and had grown
accustomed to a certain amount of state and of luxury; and these worldly
tendencies, thrown into the background by the passion, the poetry which
sprang up with the irresistible force of a pressed down spring during
her married miser