“Action now shrouds, now shows the informing thought: 
       Man, like a glass ball with a spark a-top,
       Out of the magic fire that lurks inside,
       Shows one tint at a time to take the eye
       Which, let a finger touch the silent sleep,
       Shifted a hair’s-breadth shoots you dark for bright,
       Suffuses bright with dark, and baffles so
       Your sentence absolute for shine or shade.” (vol. viii. p. 55.)

The three forms of opinion here indicated appear in the three following chapters as the respective utterance of “HALF-ROME,” “THE OTHER HALF-ROME,” and “TERTIUM QUID.”

HALF-ROME has an instinctive sympathy with the husband who has been made ridiculous, and the nobleman who is threatened with an ignominious death; and is disposed throughout to regard him as more sinned against than sinning.  “Count Guido has been unfortunate in everything.  He is one of those proud and sensitive men who make few friends, and who meet reverses half-way.  He has waited thirty years for advancement in the church, is sick of hope deferred, and is on the point of returning home to end his days, as he thinks, in frugality and peace, when a pretty girl is thrown in his way.  Visions of domestic cheerfulness and comfort rise up before him.  He is entrapped into marriage before he has had time to consider what he is doing, and discovers when it is too late that the parents reputed wealthy have little left but debts; and that in exchange for their daughter’s dowry, present and prospective, he must virtually maintain them as well as her.”

“He is far from rich, but he makes the best of a bad bargain—­takes the three with him to Arezzo, and lodges them with his mother and his youngest brother, in the old family house.  He is repaid with howls of disappointment.  Pietro and Violante want splendour and good-living.  They haven’t married their daughter to a nobleman and gone to live in his palace, to be duller than they were at home, and have less to eat and drink.  They abuse the mother, who won’t give up her place in the household, and try to sneer the young brother-priest out of his respect for old-fashioned ways.  They go back to Rome, trumpeting their wrongs:  and, once there, spring a mine upon the luckless Count.  They refuse to pay the remainder of Pompilia’s dowry, on the ground that she is not their child.  Violante Comparini has cheated her husband into accepting a base-born girl as his own, and a well-born gentleman into marrying her, but was ready to have qualms of conscience as soon as it should be convenient to tell the truth; and now the moment has come.”