“I am an old woman,” she said, “and I know the world. I do not cling to it, for I know enough about it to realize that whatever you cling to will either patronize you or get tired of you. I do not even cling to God, for that same reason. Do not pretend to be sorry for me because I am going to die, for I feel that it is really more comme il faut to be dead than alive.

“I have had lovers, a husband, hundreds of friends and admirers. I have myself in my life loved three people, and of those I have now only one left, this girl Rosina.

“Her mother was not my own child—I was her stepmother. But we were more devoted to each other than any mother and daughter ever have been. It was all meant to be so, for from my girlhood I have had the greatest terror of childbearing, and when I was demanded in marriage by a widower, whose first wife had died in childbirth, I made it a condition that I should never bear him any children myself, and because of my beauty and wealth he agreed. The girl Anna was so lovely that I have with my own eyes seen the statue of St. Joseph at the Basilica turn his head to look at her, remembering the appearance of the Virgin at the time that they were betrothed. Her feet were like swan’s bills, and the shoemaker made us our shoes over the same last. I brought her up to know that a woman’s beauty is the crowning masterpiece of God, and is not to be given away, but when she was seventeen years old she fell in love with a man, a soldier, at that—for this was the time of the wars of the French and their dreadful Emperor. She married him and followed him, and a year later she died in great agonies, like her mother.

“Though I have never had it in me really to care for any male, I had hoped that the child would be a boy. But it was a girl, and she was given into my care, for her father could not stand the sight of her, and in fact he died of a broken heart only a few months later, leaving her the heiress of his great riches, of which most was booty of war.

“Now as my granddaughter grew up, you will understand that I was all the time thinking of how I could best arrange the future for her. Did I say that her mother’s beauty was the Almighty’s highest work? No, it proved to be but his probation work, Rosina herself being the masterpiece of his craft. She was so fair that it was said in Pisa that when she drank red wine you could follow its course as it ran down her throat and chest. I did not want her to marry, so I was for a long time well pleased to see the hardness and contempt that the child showed toward all men, and especially toward the brilliant young swains who surrounded her with their adoration. But I was getting old, and I did not want to die and leave her alone in the world, either. Upon the morning of her seventeenth birthday I took to the Church of Santa Maria della Spina a great treasure that had been in my mother’s family for many hundred years, a belt of chastity that one of her ancestors had had made in Spain when he went to fight the infidels. And because his wife was a niece of St. Ferdinand of Castile, it was set with crosses of rubies. This I gave so that the saints should help me to think of what to do.

“That same evening I gave a great ball, at which the Prince Pozentiani saw Rosina, and applied for her hand. Now I will ask you, Count, was this not an answer to my prayer? For the Prince was a magnificent match. He is today the richest man in the province, for it is well known that his family can never keep their hands from making money in one way or another. Although he is a little advanced in years he is the most charming person, a Mæcenas, a man of refined tastes and many talents, and an old friend of mine. And I knew also that a caprice of nature had made him, although an admirer of our sex, incapable of being a lover or a husband. It was his vanity or his weakness not to like this to be known, and he used to keep the most expensive courtesans with him, and people were afraid of him, so that the secret did not get out. But I happened to know, because he had at a time many years ago been one of my greatest admirers, and I had liked him very much. I was so happy and thankful that I saw my own face smile to me in the mirror, like the face of a blessed spirit.

“The child Rosina herself was pleased with the Prince’s proposal, and for a time she liked him very much because of his wit and charming manners and the rich gifts which he showered upon her. The betrothal had been announced when one night, after I had already retired to bed, Rosina came into my room in her frock of high-red satin. She stood in the light of the candles, as lovely as the young St. Michele himself commanding the heavenly hosts, and told me, as if it might have been welcome news to me, that she had fallen in love with her cousin Mario, and would never marry anybody but him. Already at that moment I felt my heart faint within me. But I controlled my face, and only reminded her that the Prince was a deadly shot, and that, whatever she thought of her cousin, she had better keep him out of his way if she really liked him. She only answered as if she had been in love with death itself.

“I did not dislike Mario, for I have always had a curious weakness for my husband’s family, although they have all in them a sort of eccentricity, which has in this boy come out in a passion for astronomy. But as a husband he could not be compared to the Prince, and moreover I had only to see Rosina and him together to realize that any weakness of mine here would, within nine months, lead her straight into her mother’s tomb. Rosina had had her head turned by the Prince’s flatteries. She imagined that should she want the moon, she was to have it, much more her young cousin. When I saw her holding on to her fancy I took her before me and explained to her the facts of life. But God alone knows what has come over the generation of women who have been born after the Revolution of the French and the novels of that woman de Staël—wealth, position and a tolerant husband are not enough to them, they want to make love as we took the Sacrament.”

Here the old lady interrupted her tale. “Are you married?” she asked.

“Yes, I am married,” the young man answered her.

“I need not then,” she went on, as if satisfied with the accent of his reply, “develop to you the folly of these ideas. Rosina was so obstinate that I could not reason with her. If in the end she had told me that what she wanted was to have nine children, I should not have been surprised.

“I have arrived at an age when I cannot very well stand to be crossed. I got furious with her, as furious as I would have been with a brigand whom I had seen slinging her over his horse to carry her off to wild mountains. I told the Prince that we must hurry with the wedding, and I kept Rosina shut up in the house. I lived through these months in such a state of deadly worry that I hardly ever slept, and each night was like a journey around the world.

“Rosina had a friend, Agnese della Gherardesci, whom all her life she had loved next to me. Once, when the girls were doing needlework together, they had pricked their fingers, mixed their blood, and vowed sisterhood. This girl had been allowed to grow up wild and had become a real child of the age. She got into her head the notion that she looked like the Milord Byron, of whom so much is talked, and she used to dress and ride as a man, and to write poetry. To make Rosina happier I made Agnese come and stay with her the last week before the wedding. But there is a demon in girls when they believe a love affair to be at stake, and I think that she managed somehow to bring letters to Mario.

“On the morning before the wedding, when the Prince and I thought that all was safe, Agnese got hold of a hackney coach, Rosina slipped out of the house and got into it, and they started on the road to Pisa. A faithful maid gave them away to me, and I got into my own coach and followed them at once. By midday I overtook the miserable little carriage on the road, Agnese driving it, dressed in a coachman’s cloak, and the horses ready to drop, while mine were as fresh as ever.

“When Rosina saw me approaching at full speed she got out, and I also, when I came up to her, descended on the road, but neither of us spoke a word. I took her into my coach, paying no attention whatever to her friend, and told my coachman to turn back. On that road there is a little chapel amongst some trees. As we came up to it Rosina asked me for permission to stop the coach and enter it for a moment. I said to myself, ‘She is going to make a vow of some sort,’ and I got out and went with her into the little church. But in that dark room, smelling from the cold incense, I felt with despair that the heart of a maid is a dark church, a place of mystery, and that it is no use for an old woman to try to find her way in it. Rosina went straight to the altar and dropped on her knees. She looked into the face of the Virgin and then walked up, as if I had been an old peasant woman praying in the chapel on my own. I was in great pain, since for the life of me I could not make up a prayer. It was as if I had been informed that the Virgin and the saints had gone deaf. When I came out and saw her standing beside the coach looking toward Pisa, I spoke to her. ‘I know, if you do not,’ I said, ‘what madness it is to let the thought of any man come between you and me. Now, I can make a vow as well as you can. As I hope that we shall some day walk together in paradise, I swear that as long as I can lift my right hand I am not going to give my blessing to any marriage of yours, except with the Prince.’ Rosina looked at me and courtesied as when she was a child, and never spoke. The next day the marriage was celebrated with much splendor.

“A month after the wedding Rosina petitioned the Pope for an annulment of her marriage on the ground that it had not been consummated.

“This was a very great scandal. The Prince had mighty friends and she was all alone to begin with, and quite young and inexperienced; but she held out with a wonderful strength till in the end it was the only thing that anybody talked about, and she got the whole people with her. The Prince was not popular, mostly on account of his unhappy passion for money; and romance, you will know, appeals to the lower classes. They ended by looking upon her as some sort of saint, and when she had at last been assisted to get to Rome, the population there surrounded her in the streets and applauded her as if she had been a prima donna of the opera. The Prince behaved like a fool and used his influence to chase Mario out of Pisa, which under the circumstances was probably the most stupid thing he could have done, and he mocked the church and shocked the people.

“Rosina threw herself at the feet of the Holy Father with her certificates from all the doctors and midwives of Rome. The Prince fell down like dead when he was told about it, and for three days could not speak. He had to shut the windows so as not to hear them sing in the streets about the Virgin of Pisa, and would keep on biting his fingers while imagining the happiness of the young people—at which I think that he would be good—for as soon as she had the Pope’s letter of annulment they were married.

“During all this time, while I had heard the very air around me humming with her name, I had refused to see her, and had tried not to think of her. But what is there left in the world to take an old woman’s mind off the things she has thought about for seventeen years, when she does not want to think about them any longer?

“Two months ago I was told that my granddaughter was to have a child. Although I had of course been prepared for this, it was like the last blow to me. It nearly killed me. I thought of her mother and of my vow. I failed to believe in the saints any longer. Rosina’s picture was before me day and night as she had looked in the chapel, and my heart was filled with such bitterness as it is not right that a woman shall endure at my time of life. In the end I gave up thinking of paradise, for I thought that a hundred years there would not be worth a week within her house in Italy. For a long time I have been too ill to travel, but yesterday I set out for Pisa.

“Now, my friend, you have heard all my story, and I leave it to you to make your reflections upon the ways of providence.”

Here she made a long pause. When, frightened by it, he looked up at her face, he saw that it had fallen. She seemed to have shrunk, but beneath her waxen eyelids her clear eyes were still fixed upon his face.

“I am ready to leave this world,” she said. “It must by now know me by heart as I know it. We have nothing more to say to each other. It seems curious to me myself that I should still feel so much affection for, and take so much interest in, this old Carlotta de Gampocorta, who will soon have disappeared altogether, that I cannot let her go out without giving her the chance of assembling, and forgiving, those who have trespassed against her. But what will you—habits are not easily changed at my age. Will you go and find her for me?”

Her left arm moved on the sheet as if trying to reach his hand. Augustus touched the cold fingers. “I am at your service, Madame,” he said. She drew a deep sigh and closed her eyes. He hastened to get hold of the doctor, who had been sent for from the village.

He ordered his servants to have everything ready for an early start in the morning, and as he wanted to get his letter off before leaving, he took it up again to finish it. On reading through his reflections on life, he thought that their sadness might upset his good Karl, so he took his pen and added two lines out of Goethe’s Faust, a favorite quotation of his friend’s, by which he had many times, in Ingolstadt, closed one of their discussions:

A good man, through obscurest aspirations,

Has still the instinct of the one true way. . . .

And half smiling, he sealed the letter.