Massimilla, feeling that her strength lay in the absence of any sensual side to her love, could allow herself to be expansive; she boldly and confidently poured out her angelic spirit, she stripped it bare, just as during that diabolical night, La Tinti had displayed the soft lines of her body, and her firm, elastic flesh.  In Emilio’s eyes there was as it were a conflict between the saintly love of this white soul and that of the vehement and muscular Sicilian.

The day was spent in long looks following on deep meditations.  Each of them gauged the depths of tender feeling, and found it bottomless; a conviction that brought fond words to their lips.  Modesty, the goddess who in a moment of forgetfulness with Love, was the mother of Coquettishness, need not have put her hand before her face as she looked at these lovers.  As a crowning joy, an orgy of happiness, Massimilla pillowed Emilio’s head in her arms, and now and then ventured to press her lips to his; but only as a bird dips its beak into the clear waters of a spring, looking round lest it should be seen.  Their fancy worked upon this kiss, as a composer develops a subject by the endless resources of music, and it produced in them such tumultuous and vibrating echoes as fevered their blood.

The Idea must always be stronger than the Fact, otherwise desire would be less perfect than satisfaction, and it is in fact the stronger,—­it gives birth to wit.  And, indeed, they were perfectly happy; for enjoyment must always take something off happiness.  Married in heaven alone, these two lovers admired each other in their purest aspect, —­that of two souls incandescent, and united in celestial light, radiant to the eyes that faith has touched; and, above all, filled with the rapture which the brush of a Raphael, a Titian, a Murillo, has depicted, and which those who have ever known it, taste again as they gaze at those paintings.  Do not such peerless spirits scorn the coarser joys lavished by the Sicilian singer—­the material expression of that angelic union?

These noble thoughts were in the Prince’s mind as he reposed in heavenly calm on Massimilla’s cool, soft, white bosom, under the gentle radiance of her eyes veiled by long, bright lashes; and he gave himself up to this dream of an ideal orgy.  At such a moment, Massimilla was as one of the Virgin visions seen in dreams, which vanish at cock-crow, but whom we recognize when we find them again in their realm of glory,—­in the works of some great painters of Heaven.

In the evening the lovers went to the theatre.  This is the way of Italian life:  love in the morning; music in the evening; the night for sleep.  How far preferable is this existence to that of a country where every one expends his lungs and strength in politics, without contributing any more, single-minded, to the progress of affairs than a grain of sand can make a cloud of dust.  Liberty, in those strange lands, consists in the right to squabble over public concerns, to take care of oneself, to waste time in patriotic undertakings each more futile than the last, inasmuch as they all weaken that noble, holy self-concern which is the parent of all great human achievement.  At Venice, on the contrary, love and its myriad ties, the sweet business of real happiness, fills up all the time.