o did not know Maria Consuelo except by sight and who had long ceased
to ask him questions about her. Of late, too, he had missed his daily
visits to her less and less, until he hardly regretted them at all, nor
so much as thought of the possibility of renewing them. He laughed at
the idea that his mother should have taken the place of a woman whom he
had begun to love, and yet he was conscious that it was so, though he
asked himself how long such a condition of things could last. Corona was
far too wise to discuss his affairs with his father. He was too like
herself for her to misunderstand him, and if she regarded the whole
matter as perfectly harmless and as a legitimate subject for general
conversation, she yet understood perfectly that having been once
rebuffed by Sant' Ilario, Orsino must wish to be fully successful in his
attempt before mentioning it again to the latter. And she felt so
strongly in sympathy with her son that his work gradually acquired an
intense interest for her, and she would have sacrificed much rather
than see it fail. She did not on that account blame Giovanni for his
discouraging view when Orsino had consulted him. Giovanni was the
passion of her life and was not fallible in his impulses, though his
judgment might sometimes be at fault in technical matters for which he
cared nothing. But her love for her son was as great and sincere in its
own way, and her pride in him was such as to make his success a
condition of her future happiness.

One of the greatest novelists of this age begins one of his greatest
novels with the remark that "all happy families resemble each other, but
that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own especial way."
Generalities are dangerous in proportion as they are witty or striking,
or both, and it may be asked whether the great Tolstoi has not fallen a
victim to his own extraordinary power of striking and witty
generalisations. Does the greatest of all his generalisations, the wide
disclaimer of his early opinions expressed in the postscript
subsequently attached by him to his _Kreutzer Sonata_, include also the
words I have quoted, and which were set up, so to say, as the theme of
his _Anna Karjenina_? One may almost hope so. I am no critic, but those
words somehow seem to me to mean that only unhappiness can be
interesting. It is not pleasant to think of the consequences to which
the acceptance of such a statement might lead.

There are no statistics to tell u