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Inevitable

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<h2 class="main">CHAPTER XVII</h2> <p class="first">A coolness had arisen between Mrs. van der Staal and Cornélie; and Cornélie no longer went to dine at Belloni’s. She did not see mevrouw and the girls again for weeks; but she saw Duco daily. Notwithstanding the essential differences in their characters, they had grown so accustomed to being together that they missed each other if a day passed without their meeting; and so they had gradually come to lunch and dine together every day, almost as a matter of course: in the morning at the <i>osteria</i> and in the evening at some small restaurant or other, usually very simply. To avoid dividing the bill, Duco would pay one time and Cornélie the next. Generally they had much to talk about: he taught her Rome, took her after lunch to all manner of churches and museums; and under his guidance she began to understand, appreciate and admire. By unconscious suggestion he inspired her with some of his ideas. She found painting very difficult, but understood sculpture much more readily. And she began to look upon him as not merely morbid; she looked up to him, he spoke quite simply to her, as from his exalted standpoint of feeling and knowledge and understanding, of very exalted matters which she, as a girl and later as a young married woman, had never seen in the glorious apotheosis which he caused to rise before her like the first gleam of a dawn, of a new day in which she beheld new types of life, created of all that was noblest in the artist’s soul. He regretted that he could not show her Giotto in the Santa Croce at Florence and the Primitives in the Uffizi and that he had to teach her Rome straight away; but he introduced her to all the exuberant art-life of the Papal Renascence, until, under the influence of his speech, she shared that life for a single intense second and until Michael Angelo and Raphael stood out before her, also living. After a day like that, he would think that after all she was not so hopelessly inartistic; and she thought of him with respect, even after the suggestion was interrupted and when she reflected on what she had seen and heard and really, deep down in herself, no longer understood things so well as she had that morning, because she was lacking in love for them. But so much glamour of colour and the past remained whirling before her eyes in the evening that it made her pamphlet seem drab and dull; and the feminist movement ceased to interest her and she did not care about Urania Hope.</p> <p>He admitted to himself that he had quite lost his peace of mind, that Cornélie stood before him in his thoughts, between him and his old triptychs, that his lonely, friendless, ingenuous, simple life, content with wandering through and outside Rome, with reading, dreaming and now and then painting a little, had changed entirely in habit and in line, now that the line of his life had crossed that of hers and they both seemed to be going one way, he did not really know why. Love was not exactly the word for the feeling that drew him towards her. And just very vaguely, inwardly and unconsciously he suspected, though he never actually said or even thought as much, that it was the line of her figure, which was marked by something almost Byzantine, the slenderness of the frame, the long arms, the drooping lily-line of the woman who suffered, with the melancholy in her grey eyes, overshadowed by their almost too-long lashes; that it was the noble shape of her hand, small and pretty for a tall woman; that it was a movement of her neck, as of a swaying stalk, or a tired swan trying to glance backwards. He had never met many women and those whom he had met had always seemed very ordinary; but she was unreal to him, in the contradictions of her character, in its vagueness and intangibility, in all the half-tints which escaped his eye, accustomed to half-tints though it was.... What was she like? What he had always seen in her character was a woman in a novel, a heroine in a poem. What was she as a living woman of flesh and blood? She was not artistic and she was not inartistic; she had no energy and yet she did not lack energy; she was not precisely cultivated; and yet, obeying her impulse and her intuition, she wrote a pamphlet on one of the most modern questions and worked at it and revised and copied it, till it became a piece of writing no worse than another. She had a spacious way of thinking, loathing all the pettiness of the cliques, no longer feeling at home, after her suffering, in her little Hague set; and here, in Rome, at a dance she listened behind a door to a nonsensical conspiracy, hardly worthy of the name, he thought, and had gone to Urania Hope to mingle with the confused curves of smaller lives, curves without importance, of people whom he despised for their lack of line, of colour, of vision, of haze, of everything that was dear as life to him and made up life for him.... What was she like? He did not understand her. But her curve was of importance to him. She was not without a line: a line of art and line of life; she moved in the dream of her own indefiniteness before his gazing eyes; and she loomed up out of the haze, as out of the twilight of his studio atmosphere, and stood before him like a phantom. He would not call that love; but she was dear to him like a revelation that constantly veiled itself in secrecy. And his life as a lonely wanderer was, it was true, changed; but she had introduced no inharmonious habit into his life: he enjoyed taking his meals in a little café or <i>osteria</i>; and she took them with him easily and simply, not squalidly but pleasantly and harmoniously, with an adaptability and with just as much natural grace as when she used to dine of an evening at the <i lang= "fr">table-d’hôte</i> at Belloni’s. All this—that contradictory admixture of unreality, of inconsistency; that living vision of indefiniteness; that intangibility of her individual essence; that self-concealment of the soul; that blending of her essential characteristics—had become a charm to him: a restlessness, a need, a nervous want in his life, otherwise so restful, so easily contented and calm, but above all a charm, an indispensable every-day charm.</p> <p>And, without troubling about what people might think, about what Mrs. van der Staal thought, they would one day go to Tivoli together, or another day walk from Castel Gandolfo to Albano and drive to the Lago di Nemi and picnic at the Villa Sforza-Cesarini, with the broken capital of a classic pillar for a table. They rested side by side in the shadow of the trees, admired the camellias, silently contemplated the glassy clearness of the lake, Diana’s looking-glass, and drove back over Frascati. They were silent in the carriage; and he smiled as he reflected how they had been taken everywhere that day for man and wife. She also thought of their increasing intimacy and at the same time thought that she would never marry again. And she thought of her husband and compared him with Duco, so young in the face but with eyes full of depth and soul, a voice so calm and even, with everything that he said much to the point, so accurately informed; and then his calmness, his simplicity, his lack of passion, as though his nerves had schooled themselves only to feel the calmness of art in the dreamy mist of his life. And she confessed to herself, there, in the carriage beside him, amid the softly shelving hills, purpling away in the evening, while before her faded the rose-mallow of a pale gold sunset, that he was dear to her because of that cleverness, that absence of passion, that simplicity and that accuracy of information—a clear voice sounding up out of the dreamy twilight—and that she was happy to be sitting beside him, to hear that voice and by chance to feel his hand, happy in that her line of life had crossed his, in that their two lines seemed to form a path towards the increasing brightness, the gradual daily elucidation of their immediate future.... </p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />

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