No word is more lightly spoken than shame.  Vittoria’s early devotion to her Art, and subsequently to her Italy, had carried her through the term when she would otherwise have showed the natural mild attack of the disease.  It came on her now in a rush, penetrating every chamber of her heart, overwhelming her; she could see no distinction between being ever so little false and altogether despicable.  She had loathings of her body and her life.  With grovelling difficulty of speech she endeavoured to convey the sense of her repugnance to Laura, who leaned her ear, wondering at such bluntness of wit in a woman, and said, “Are you quite deficient in the craft of your sex, child?  You can, and you will, guard yourself ten times better when your aim is simply to subject him.”  But this was not reason to a spirit writhing in the serpent-coil of fiery blushes.

Vittoria said, “I shall pity him so.”

She meant she would pity Wilfrid in deluding him.  It was a taint of the hypocrisy which comes with shame.

The signora retorted:  “I can’t follow the action of your mind a bit.”

Pity being a form of tenderness, Laura supposed that she would intuitively hate the man who compelled her to do what she abhorred.

They spent the greater portion of the night in this debate.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE ESCAPE OF ANGELO

Vittoria knew better than Laura that the task was easy; she had but to override her aversion to the show of trifling with a dead passion; and when she thought of Angelo lying helpless in the swarm of enemies, and that Wilfrid could consent to use his tragic advantage to force her to silly love-play, his selfishness wrought its reflection, so that she became sufficiently unjust to forget her marvellous personal influence over him.  Even her tenacious sentiment concerning his white uniform was clouded.  She very soon ceased to be shamefaced in her own fancy.  At dawn she stood at her window looking across the valley of Meran, and felt the whole scene in a song of her heart, with the faintest recollection of her having passed through a tempest overnight.  The warm Southern glow of the enfoliaged valley recalled her living Italy, and Italy her voice.  She grew wakefully glad:  it was her nature, not her mind, that had twisted in the convulsions of last night’s horror of shame.  The chirp of healthy blood in full-flowing veins dispersed it; and as a tropical atmosphere is cleared by the hurricane, she lost her depression and went down among her enemies possessed by an inner delight, that was again of her nature, not of her mind.  She took her gladness for a happy sign that she had power to rise buoyant above circumstances; and though aware that she was getting to see things in harsh outlines, she was unconscious of her haggard imagination.