Vittoria fenced:  “But is there such a thing as happiness?”

“I should imagine so,” said Agostino, touching her cheek, “and slipperiness likewise.  There’s patience at any rate; only you must dig for it.  You arrive at nothing, but the eternal digging constitutes the object gained.  I recollect when I was a raw lad, full of ambition, in love, and without a franc in my pockets, one night in Paris, I found myself looking up at a street lamp; there was a moth in it.  He couldn’t get out, so he had very little to trouble his conscience.  I think he was near happiness:  he ought to have been happy.  My luck was not so good, or you wouldn’t see me still alive, my dear.”

Vittoria sighed for a plainer speaker.

CHAPTER XXXVII

ON LAGO MAGGIORE

Carlo’s hours were passed chiefly across the lake, in the Piedmontese valleys.  When at Pallanza he was restless, and he shunned the two or three minutes of privacy with his betrothed which the rigorous Italian laws besetting courtship might have allowed him to take.  He had perpetually the look of a man starting from wine.  It was evident that he and Countess d’Isorella continued to hold close communication, for she came regularly to the villa to meet him.  On these occasions Countess Ammiani accorded her one ceremonious interview, and straightway locked herself in her room.  Violetta’s grace of ease and vivacity soared too high to be subject to any hostile judgement of her character.  She seemed to rely entirely on the force of her beauty, and to care little for those who did not acknowledge it.  She accepted public compliments quite royally, nor was Agostino backward in offering them.  “And you have a voice, you know,” he sometimes said aside to Vittoria; but she had forgotten how easily she could swallow great praise of her voice; she had almost forgotten her voice.  Her delight was to hang her head above inverted mountains in the lake, and dream that she was just something better than the poorest of human creatures.  She could not avoid putting her mind in competition with this brilliant woman’s, and feeling eclipsed; and her weakness became pitiable.  But Countess d’Isorella mentioned once that Pericles was at the Villa Ricciardi, projecting magnificent operatic entertainments.  The reviving of a passion to sing possessed Vittoria like a thirst for freedom, and instantly confused all the reflected images within her, as the fury of a sudden wind from the high Alps scourges the glassy surface of the lake.  She begged Countess Ammiani’s permission that she might propose to Pericles to sing in his private operatic company, in any part, at the shortest notice.

“You wish to leave me?” said the countess, and resolutely conceived it.