Maria and Gianni Provana did not speak. She walked slowly, as if very tired.
“I am incapable of any wit near you, Donna Maria,” said Provana, after a little time.
“Don’t give yourself any trouble; it is useless.”
“Is it true that you are so mortally bored?”
“You know it, it seems,” she replied indifferently, far away.
“Once you told me that you found the strength to live in yourself, and only in yourself. Those were your words, I think. I didn’t understand them very well, but I remember them.”
“Yes, I said them once,” she murmured thoughtfully. “And it was true then; but now it is no longer true.”
“I have nothing more within me,” she replied desolately.
But she seemed to say it to herself more than to him.
“Try to interest yourself in something outside yourself,” he suggested insinuatingly and quietly, hiding the intense interest which agitated him.
“I have tried various things; and I haven’t succeeded in binding myself to anybody or anything.”
“I have nothing to do with my life, that is all,” she concluded, coldly and gloomily, looking at the gnarled trunk of a very old tree.
“Still, two years ago in returning to your home----” he resumed.
“That tragic and grotesque farce has ended with my husband as the travesty of a hero, and with me as a travesty of a penitent!” she exclaimed with a sneer.
“You already know that Emilio hates and despises me,” she continued, with an increasingly mordant irony. “He must have told you. Among men you discuss these things.”
Provana was silent, but he had an air of agreeing.
“All this for having wished to pardon me, dear Provana. Pardon wasn’t in him, neither was it in me.”
“Because pardon is a great thing, when the soul remains great that accords it--a pardon complete and absolute; but in the other case what a miserable, humiliating, and insulting thing a pardon is!”
“Oh, Emilio is a poor creature!” she said, with a profound accent of disdain, shrugging her shoulders, and adding nothing further, as if she had said the last word about him.
“I? I owe to one of my usual exaltations having inflicted on my lively being one of the most unsupportable humiliations feminine pride can ever endure.”
She stopped, troubled and proudly pale, with eyes veiled in tears of indignation.