I should not have allowed them to speak to me.” She reminded him that at their first meeting they had vaguely remembered meeting each other in the road about a year ago. So that, as she explained, he was not just anyone. Emilio gravely replied that he had only meant to say he would have got what he deserved.

At that point he began to instruct her on some of the assets in which her education seemed to him to be lacking. He said she was not calculating enough, and he blamed her for it. A girl in her situation ought to look after her own interests better. What was honesty in this world? Why, self-interest! An honest woman was one who looked out for the highest bidder and took care not to fall in love unless she could make a good thing out of it. As he spoke, he felt himself to be a superior being, an immoralist, who sees things as they are and is content that they should be so. He suddenly felt that his thinking-machine, which had so long been inactive, had begun functioning again and was in perfect order. His bosom swelled with pride, he was a man once more.

She listened to him with profound attention and in some bewilderment. She evidently thought he intended her to believe that an honest woman and a rich woman were one and the same thing. “So this is what those grand ladies are like?” Then when she saw him looking somewhat surprised, she at once denied that that was what she meant to say; but if he had really been as acute an observer as he imagined himself to be, he would have seen that she no longer understood at all the line of argument which had caused her so much astonishment a short while before.

He repeated and developed his idea. An honest woman knows her own value, that is her secret. If you are not honest you must at least seem to be so. It was bad enough that Sorniani should allow himself to speak lightly of her, worse still that she should announce she was fond of Leardi—and here his jealousy got the better of him—that odious little Don Juan whom no nice woman would care to be seen with. It was better to do wrong than to look as if one were doing it.

She at once forgot the general ideas which he had been explaining so carefully, and began to defend herself vigorously against his accusations. Sorniani didn’t know anything against her, he had no business to talk about her, and as for Leardi, he was a perfectly nice young man, whom no girl would mind being seen with.

He had finished his lesson for that evening; so potent a medicine, he thought, had better be administered in small doses. Besides, he felt he had already made a sufficient sacrifice in snatching all those moments from love-making.

He had a certain literary prejudice against the name Angiolina. He called her Lina; but when this abbreviation did not please him he turned her name into French and called her Angèle; or, if he wanted to be more tender still, he changed it to Ange. He taught her how to say in French that she loved him. When she knew what the words meant she refused to repeat them, but at their next meeting she volunteered without his asking her “Je tem bocù.”

He was not really at all surprised to have made such rapid progress. It was exactly what he had hoped. She had found him so reasonable that she felt she could trust him completely, and for a long time he did not even give her the opportunity of refusing him anything.

They always met in the open air. They had made love in all the suburban roads of Trieste. After their first few meetings they deserted Sant’ Andrea because it was too frequented, and for a certain time after that they favored the Strada d’Opicina, which was a broad, lonely road, leading almost imperceptibly uphill, and bordered on each side by dense horse-chestnuts. They always halted by a low, jutting wall which came to mark the limit of their walk, because they had sat down on it to rest the first time they went that way. They remained folded in a long embrace, with the city at their feet, as silent and dead as the sea which, from that height, seemed one vast expanse of color, mysterious, undefined. Motionless there in the silence, city, sea, and hills seemed to be all of one piece, as if some artist had shaped and colored all that matter according to his own strange fancy, and dotted the intersecting lines with points of yellow light which were really the street lanterns.

The gradually increasing moonlight did nothing to change the color of the landscape. Certain objects whose outlines had become more distinct, could rather be said to be veiled in light than to be illuminated by it. A snowy brilliance overspread it, motionless, while color slumbered within a shade of secret immobility even on the sea, whose external movements one could just discern in the silver play of water on its surface; color was lost in sleep. The green of the hills and all the many colors of the houses were darkened, while the light which saturated the outer air seemed to be suspended in white incorruptible purity, inaccessibly removed from contact with the objects of our vision.

The moonlight seemed to have become incarnate in the girl’s face so near to his own, and to have stolen the youthful rose of her cheeks while leaving intact that golden glow which it seemed to Emilio that he could actually taste with his lips. Her face had become grave, almost austere, and as he kissed it he felt himself to be more than ever a seducer.