a's husband.

He knew him better now. That very evening in a box at the theatre, Elena
had introduced them to one another, and he had seized that opportunity
to examine him attentively in detail with the keenest curiosity, as
though he hoped to obtain some revelation, to draw some secret from him.
He could still hear the man's voice--a voice of very peculiar tone,
somewhat harsh and strident, with an interrogative inflection at the end
of each sentence. Again he saw those pale, pale eyes under the great
prominent forehead, eyes that at times assumed a hideous, glassy, dead
look, and at others lit up with an indefinable gleam that savoured of
madness. Those hands too, he saw--white and smooth and thickly covered
with sandy yellow down, and with something obscene in their every
movement; their way of raising the opera-glass, of unfolding a
handkerchief, of reclining on the cushion in front of the box or turning
over the pages of the libretto--hands instinct with vice.

Oh, horror! he saw those hands touching Elena, profaning her with their
odious caresses.

The torture became insupportable. He rose once more, went to the
window, opened it, shivered under the biting breeze and shook himself.
The Trinita de' Monti glittered in the deep blue sky, sharply outlined
as if sculptured in faintly tinted marble. Rome, spread out beneath him,
had a sheen as of crystal, like a city cut in a glacier.

The calm and sparkling cold brought his mind back to the realities of
life and enabled him to recognise the true condition of his mind. He
closed the window and sat down again. Once more the enigmatical aspect
of Elena's character occupied him, questions crowded in upon him
tumultuously, persistently. But he had the strength of mind to
co-ordinate them, to attack them one by one, with singular lucidity. The
deeper he went in his analysis the more lucid became his mental vision,
and he worked out his psychological revenge with cruel relish. At last
he felt that he had laid bare a soul, penetrated a mystery. It seemed to
him, that thus he made Elena infinitely more his own than in the days of
their passion.

What, after all, was this woman?--An unbalanced mind in a sensually
inclined body. As with all who are greedy of pleasure, the foundation of
her moral being was overweening egotism. Her dominant faculty, her
intellectual axis, so to speak, was imagination--an imagination
nourished upon a wide range of literature, connected with he