"You sigh, Marianna? I have touched one of the aching wounds in your
heart. It was a noble part for you to play, so young as you were,
--that of protectress to a noble but wandering intellect. You said
to yourself: 'Paolo will be my genius; I shall be his common sense;
between us we shall be that almost divine being called an angel,--the
sublime creature that enjoys and understands, reason never stifling
love.'

"And then, in the first impetus of youth, you heard the thousand
voices of nature which the poet longed to reproduce. Enthusiasm
clutched you when Paolo spread before you the treasures of poetry,
while seeking to embody them in the sublime but restricted language of
music; you admired him when delirious rapture carried him up and away
from you, for you liked to believe that all this devious energy would
at last come down and alight as love. But you knew not the tyrannous
and jealous despotism of the ideal over the minds that fall in love
with it. Gambara, before meeting you, had given himself over to the
haughty and overbearing mistress, with whom you have struggled for him
to this day.

"Once, for an instant, you had a vision of happiness. Paolo, tumbling
from the lofty sphere where his spirit was constantly soaring, was
amazed to find reality so sweet; you fancied that his madness would be
lulled in the arms of love. But before long Music again clutched her
prey. The dazzling mirage which had cheated you into the joys of
reciprocal love made the lonely path on which you had started look
more desolate and barren.

"In the tale your husband has just told me, I could read, as plainly
as in the contrast between your looks and his, all the painful secrets