Peter, we may suppose, returned to Villa Floriano that
afternoon in a state of some excitement.
"He ought to have told her--"
"It was her right to be told--"
"What could her rank matter--"
"A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--"
"She would have despised the conventional barriers--"
"No woman could be proof against such a compliment--"
The case was peculiar--ordinary rules could not apply to it--"
"Every man gets the wife he deserves--and he had certainly gone
a long way towards deserving her--"
"He should simply have told her the story of his book and of
her part in it--he need n't have mentioned love--she would have
understood--"
The Duchessa's voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded
perpetually in his ears; the words she had spoken, the
arguments she had urged, repeated and repeated themselves,
danced round and round, in his memory.
"Ought I to have told her--then and there? Shall I go to her
and tell her to-morrow?"
He tried to think; but he could not think. His faculties were
in a whirl--he could by no means command them. He could only
wait, inert, while the dance went on. It was an extremely
riotous dance. The Duchessa's conversation was reproduced
without sequence, without coherence--scattered fragments of it
were flashed before him fitfully, in swift disorder. If he
would attempt to seize upon one of those fragments, to detain
and fix it, for consideration--a speech of hers, a look, an
inflection--then the whole experience suddenly lost its
outlines, his recollection of it became a jumble, and he was
left, as it were, intellectually gasping.
He walked about his garden, he went into the house, he came
out, he walked about again. he went in and dressed for dinner,
he
sat on his rustic bench, he smoked cigarette after cigarette.
"Ought I to have told her? Ought I to tell her to-morrow?"
At moments there would come a lull in the turmoil, an interval
of quiet, of apparent clearness; and the answer would seem
perfectly plain.
"Of course, you ought to tell her. Tell her--and all will be
well. She has put herself in the supposititious woman's place,
and she says, 'He ought to tell her.' She says it earnestly,
vehemently. That means that if she were the woman, she would
wish to be told. She will despise the conventional barriers
--she will be touched, she will be moved. 'No woman could be
proof against such a compliment.' Go to her to-morrow, and
tell her--and all will be well."