described her beauty to me, as if in order to excuse himself for having become the slave to her he was.  I suppose she was very beautiful.  He said that she had a physical charm so intense that few men could resist it, that she was famous throughout Europe for it.  He told me that she was not a good woman.  I gathered that she lived for pleasure, admiration, that she had allowed many men to love her before he knew her.  But she had loved him genuinely.  She was not a very young woman, and she was not a married woman.  He said that she was a woman men loved but did not marry, a woman who was loved by the husbands of married women, a woman to marry whom would exclude a man from the society of good women.  She had never lived, or thought of living, for one man till he came into her life.  Nor had he ever dreamed of living for one woman.  He had lived to gain experience; she too.  But when he met her—­knowing thoroughly all she was—­all other women ceased to exist for him.  He became her slave.  Then jealousy awoke in him, jealousy of all the men who had been in her life, who might be in her life again.  He was tortured by loving such a woman—­a woman who had belonged to many, who would no doubt in the future belong to others.  For despite the fact that she loved him he told me that at first he had no illusions about her.  He knew the world too well for that, and he cursed the fate that had bound him body and soul to what he called a courtesan.  Even the fact that she loved him at first did not blind him to the effect upon character that her life must inevitably have had.  She had dwelt in an atmosphere of lies, he said, and to lie was nothing to her.  Any original refinement of feeling as regards human relations that she might have had had become dulled, if it had not been destroyed.  At first he blindly, miserably, resigned himself to this.  He said to himself, ’Fate has led me to love this sort of woman.  I must accept her as she is, with all her defects, with her instinct for treachery, with her passion for the admiration of the world, with her incapability for being true to an ideal, or for isolating herself in the adoration of one man.  I cannot get away from her.  She has me fast.  I cannot live without her.  Then I must bear the torture that jealousy of her will certainly bring me in silence.  I must conceal it.  I must try to kill it.  I must make the best of whatever she will give me, knowing that she can never, with her nature and her training, be exclusively mine as a good woman might be.’  This he said to himself.  This plan of conduct he traced for himself.  But he soon found that he was not strong enough to keep to it.  His jealousy was a devouring fire, and he could not conceal it.  Domini, he described to me minutely the effect of jealousy in a human heart.  I had never imagined what it was, and, when he described it, I felt as if I looked down into a bottomless pit lined with the flames of hell.  By the depth of that pit I measured the depth of his passion for this woman, and I gained