Of the two it was really he who was the egoist. She was like a mother to him in her unselfish devotion, but this did not prevent him from speaking as if his shoulders were weighed down by the burden of another precious life bound to his own, and of acting as if this weight of responsibility obliged him to go cautiously through life, avoiding all its perils, but also renouncing all its pleasures and all hope of earthly felicity. At the age of thirty-five, the desire for pleasures he had never tasted, for love he had never known surged up in his heart, but with a sense of bitterness and frustration at the thought of all he might have enjoyed: and he was conscious at the same time of a great mistrust of himself, and of the weakness of his own character which hitherto he had had occasion rather to suspect than to prove by actual experience.

He had approached her with the idea of a brief and easy intrigue, such as he had so often heard described, but had never yet experienced, at least hardly in such a form as to be worthy of the name. She had dropped her sunshade just in time to provide him with an excuse for accosting her. and now that he was thus cunningly entangled in the pretty web of the young girl's life he felt no desire to free himself from it until he should have advanced much further into her intimacy.

But the amazing purity of her profile and her incomparable good health --- are not good health and corruption always assumed by the rhetorician to be incompatible? --- had subdued the ardor of his first onset and, overcome with a sudden reluctance to go further, he now found all his delight in marvelling at the mystery of her face, with its clear and delicate chiselling and infinite sweetness of expression. His happiness was complete, he was at rest.

She hesitated --- she clearly hesitated. One part of the story, the mountain part, she grasped at once. He only saw the love in it; she, on the other hand, at once felt the boredom and the cold. She looked at him, saw what answer he expected of her, and just to please him, replied without any enthusiasm: "Oh, it would be glorious!"

The sky was clear in spite of the scirocco which had been hanging over the town since morning

"Enough, enough," he said contemptuously. "I have only one thing more to say to you. I loved you very much and that alone ought to have given me the right to be treated differently. When a girl allows a young man to tell her he loves her she belongs to him and is not free to do as she likes." This phrase was rather feeble, but it expressed exactly what he wanted to say. which is a great deal to expect of a lover's reproach. He had in fact no other claim to plead save the fact that he had told her he loved her.

Looking more bilious than ever

When he awoke he found that night was falling, one of those melancholy sunsets at the close of a lovely winter's day. He sat up on his bed. still undecided as to what he should do. Often he used to study at that hour, but now his books looked down from their shelves in vain. All those titles spoke of something dead and gone and quite incapable of making him forget for a single instant the painful life-struggle which was still being waged in his breast.

He made an effort to profit by his newly acquired liberty. He felt that his mind had become inactive, and the idea pained him, for he remembered how years ago art had given color to his life, lifting him out of the inertia into which he had fallen after the death of his father. It was then that he had written his novel, the story of a young artist whose intellect and health are ruined by a woman. He had portrayed himself in the hero, his own innocence and gentleness of nature. His heroine he had pictured after the fashion of the time as a mixture of woman and tiger. She had the movements, the eyes, the sanguinary character of the wild beast. He had never known a woman and that was how he imagined her, an animal whom it was hard to conceive ever being born or prospering in this world. But with what confidence he had described her! He had suffered and enjoyed with her and sometimes even felt that he harbored in himself that monstrous hybrid of tiger and woman.

[...] He thought of her continually as an old man thinks of his youth. How young he had been that night when he wanted to kill her in order to calm himself! If he had written then instead of pacing about the streets like an angry lion, and afterwards tossing wearily in his bed. he would surely have discovered a new artistic road which later he had sought in vain. But it was all over for ever. Angiolina still lived, but she could never give him back his youth.

He continued to hope that entire possession of her would in the end subdue the violence of his feelings. But he continued to go to their rendezvous with the same uncontrollable desire and he could not get rid of the tendency to reconstruct the Ange who was daily broken into fragments. His dissatisfaction led him to seek refuge in the sweetest of dreams; so Angiolina really gave him everything: the possession of her body and --- since one gave birth to the other --- the poet's dream as well.

[...] They were walking along the seafront when they saw Angiolina coming towards them, all lit up by the midday sun which was playing in her fair curls. She had screwed up her face a little in the effort to keep her eyes open in the strong sunlight. Balli found himself suddenly face to face with his masterpiece and, disregarding its outline, saw it for the first time in all its details. She advanced towards them with that firm step of hers which did not in the least diminish the grace of her upright figure. Youth incarnate, clothed, would have walked like that in the sunlight.

he took on almost a sacerdotal air

Dawn was beginning, dark, hesitating, sad. It was whitening the windowpanes but left the interior of the room in darkness. One ray however, seemed to have penetrated, for the daylight breaking over the glasses on the table colored them with faint and delicate shades of blue and green. The wind was still blowing in the street with the same even, triumphant sounds as when Emilio had left Angiolina.