With this feeling, however, there mingled no desire or eager curiosity,
on my part, to find out the secret reason of her solitude, or to break
down the fragile barrier of our almost voluntary separation. What to me
was this woman whom I had met by chance among the mountains of a
foreign land, ill in health and sick at heart though she might be? I
had shaken the dust from my feet, or at least I thought I had, and felt
no wish to hold to the world once more by any link of the mind, or of
the senses, still less by any weakness of the heart. I felt supreme
contempt for love, for under its name I had met only with affectation,
coquetry, fickleness, and levity; if I except the love of Antonina,
which had been but a childish ecstasy, a flower fallen from the stem
before its hour of perfume.
VIII.
Again, who was this woman? Was she a being like myself, or one of those
visions which, like living meteors, shoot athwart the sky of our
imagination, dazzling the eye? Was she of my own country, or from some
distant land, from some island of the tropics, or the far East, whither
I could not follow her? After adoring her for a few days, might I not
have to mourn forever her absence? Was her heart free to respond to
mine? Was it likely that enthralling beauty such as hers should have
traversed the world and reached maturity without kindling love in some
of those upon whom the glance of her eye had fallen? Had she a father
or a mother, brothers or sisters? Was she not married? Was there not
one man in the world who, though separated from her by inexplicable
circumstances, lived for her only, as she lived for him?
All this I said to myself, to drive away this one besetting, hopeless
fancy.
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