only by occasional short but amusing conversations with Andrea Contini.  His evenings were generally passed among a set of people who did not know Maria Consuelo except by sight and who had long ceased to ask him questions about her.  Of late, too, he had missed his daily visits to her less and less, until he hardly regretted them at all, nor so much as thought of the possibility of renewing them.  He laughed at the idea that his mother should have taken the place of a woman whom he had begun to love, and yet he was conscious that it was so, though he asked himself how long such a condition of things could last.  Corona was far too wise to discuss his affairs with his father.  He was too like herself for her to misunderstand him, and if she regarded the whole matter as perfectly harmless and as a legitimate subject for general conversation, she yet understood perfectly that having been once rebuffed by Sant’ Ilario, Orsino must wish to be fully successful in his attempt before mentioning it again to the latter.  And she felt so strongly in sympathy with her son that his work gradually acquired an intense interest for her, and she would have sacrificed much rather than see it fail.  She did not on that account blame Giovanni for his discouraging view when Orsino had consulted him.  Giovanni was the passion of her life and was not fallible in his impulses, though his judgment might sometimes be at fault in technical matters for which he cared nothing.  But her love for her son was as great and sincere in its own way, and her pride in him was such as to make his success a condition of her future happiness.

One of the greatest novelists of this age begins one of his greatest novels with the remark that “all happy families resemble each other, but that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own especial way.”  Generalities are dangerous in proportion as they are witty or striking, or both, and it may be asked whether the great Tolstoi has not fallen a victim to his own extraordinary power of striking and witty generalisations.  Does the greatest of all his generalisations, the wide disclaimer of his early opinions expressed in the postscript subsequently attached by him to his Kreutzer Sonata, include also the words I have quoted, and which were set up, so to say, as the theme of his Anna Karjenina?  One may almost hope so.  I am no critic, but those words somehow seem to me to mean that only unhappiness can be interesting.  It is not pleasant to think of the consequences to which the acceptance of such a statement might lead.

There are no statistics to tell us whether the majority of living men and women are to be considered as happy or unhappy.  But it does seem true that whereas a single circumstance can cause very great and lasting unhappiness, felicity is always dependent upon more than one condition and often upon so many as to make the explanation of it a highly difficult and complicated matter.