The people whose lives are full of the most romantic incidents, are not generally, I think, people of romantic disposition.  Romance, like power, will come uncalled for, and those who seek it most, are often those who find it least.  And the reason is simple enough.  The man of heart is not perpetually burrowing in his surroundings for affections upon which his heart may feed, any more than the very strong man is naturally impelled to lift every weight he sees or to fight with every man he meets.  The persons whom others call romantic are rarely conscious of being so.  They are generally far too much occupied with the one great thought which make their strongest, bravest and meanest actions seem perfectly commonplace to themselves.  Corona Del Carmine, who had heroically sacrificed herself in her earliest girlhood to save her father from ruin and who a few years later had risked a priceless happiness to shield a foolish girl, had not in her whole life been conscious of a single romantic instinct.  Brave, devoted, but unimaginative by nature, she had followed her heart’s direction in most worldly matters.

She was amazed to find that she was becoming romantic now, in her dreams for Orsino’s future.  All sorts of ideas which she would have laughed at in her own youth flitted through her brain from morning till night.  Her fancy built up a life for her eldest son, which she knew to be far from the possibility of realisation, but which had for her a new and strange attraction.

She planned for him the most unimaginable happiness, of a kind which would perhaps have hardly satisfied his more modern instincts.  She saw a maiden of indescribable beauty, brought up in unapproachable perfections, guarded by the all but insuperable jealousy of an ideal home.  Orsino was to love this vision, and none other, from the first meeting to the term of his natural life, and was to win her in the face or difficulties such as would have made even Giovanni, the incomparable, look grave.  This radiant creature was also to love Orsino, as a matter of course, with a love vastly more angelic than human, but not hastily nor thoughtlessly, lest Orsino should get her too easily and not value her as he ought.  Then she saw the two betrothed, side by side on shady lawns and moonlit terraces, in a perfectly beautiful intimacy such as they would certainly never enjoy in the existing conditions of their own society.  But that mattered little.  The wooing, the winning and the marrying of the exquisite girl were to make up Orsino’s life, and fifty or sixty years of idyllic happiness were to be the reward of their mutual devotion.  Had she not spent twenty such years herself?  Then why should not all the rest be possible?