“O my conscience, secure and firm, do you know I have managed to extract from Vittoria her secret. Do you know that her secret is terror of you, terror of what you have been in my life, which has been painted fantastically for her--simple, innocent girl--as something horrible and tremendous. Her childish secret as betrothed, bride, and wife, was this ferocious terror that I might belong to you as a lover for ever, that through the mysterious reasons of passion you would always keep me, and that from one day to another I could again belong to you through the impetuous and imperious reasons of desire. By pressing her cold white hands I communicated a flame of life to her, by fixing my eyes on hers I placed a gleam in those two bright eyes, and then I learnt her secret. Hers is a soul sick with this terror. On your account, my lofty pure conscience, on my own, since I am pledged to follow every wish of yours, I have word for word, act for act, tried to destroy in her this morbid terror of you; and believe me, believe me in everything, any other woman would be convinced that her terror was in vain, would have given me all her heart and soul for recognition, affection, love. But the more I demonstrated to her that the bonds of passion were undone through your will and mine, the denser became the veil which surrounded her. Whatever was she wanting, whatever was she asking, for her existence as a woman and a wife; whatever was existence able to give her; more than the affectionate and tender companionship of a man like me, dedicated entirely to her, who desired nothing more than to see her smile in her juvenile happiness, and himself to be the only origin of that smile and that joy? Maria, my wife has smiled five or six times in one year of matrimony, and hasn’t laughed once. Ah, I have tried to tear the closely knit and invisible texture in which she is clothed even because of this, and I have asked her whatever she could wish from me beyond this certainty that I am no longer yours, whatever else she could expect from a man, a companion and a husband beyond this great and absolute dedication to her happiness which should be sufficient for any woman. She lowered her eyelids, closed her little mouth as usual, all her face became as marble. Oh, if only once to see that white marble face flesh!--and she replied--