“Keep it secret, you mean?” she retorted.  “Yes, I pardon that wish of yours.  I can pardon much to my beauty.”

She stood up as majestically as she had spoken.

“You know, my Violetta, that I am madly in love.”

“I have learnt it.”

“You know it:—­what else would . . ?  If I were not lost in love, could I see you as I do and let Brescia be the final chapter?”

Violetta sighed.  “I should have preferred its being so rather than this superfluous additional line to announce an end, like a foolish staff on the edge of a cliff.  You thought that you were saluting a leper, or a saint?”

“Neither.  If ever we can talk together again, as we have done,” Carlo said gloomily, “I will tell you what I think of myself.”

“No, but Richelieu might have behaved . . . .  Ah! perhaps not quite in the same way,” she corrected her flowing apology for him.  “But then, he was a Frenchman.  He could be flighty without losing his head.  Dear Italian Carlo!  Yes, in the teeth of Barto Rizzo, and for the sake of the country, marry her at once.  It will be the best thing for you; really the best.  You want to know from me the whereabout of Barto Rizzo.  He may be in the mountain over Stresa, or in Milan.  He also has thrown off my yoke, such as it was!  I do assure you, Carlo, I have no command over him:  but, mind, I half doat on the wretch.  No man made me desperately in love with myself before he saw me, when I stopped his raving in the middle of the road with one look of my face.  There was foam on his beard and round his eyes; the poor wretch took out his handkerchief, and he sobbed.  I don’t know how many luckless creatures he had killed on his way; but when I took him into my carriage—­king, emperor, orator on stilts, minister of police not one has flattered me as he did, by just gazing at me.  Beauty can do as much as music, my Carlo.”

Carlo thanked heaven that Violetta had no passion in her nature.  She had none:  merely a leaning toward evil, a light sense of shame, a desire for money, and in her heart a contempt for the principles she did not possess, but which, apart from the intervention of other influences, could occasionally sway her actions.  Friendship, or rather the shadowy recovery of a past attachment that had been more than friendship, inclined her now and then to serve a master who failed distinctly to represent her interests; and when she met Carlo after the close of the war, she had really set to work in hearty kindliness to rescue him from what she termed “shipwreck with that disastrous Republican crew.”  He had obtained greater ascendency over her than she liked; yet she would have forgiven it, as well as her consequent slight deviation from direct allegiance to her masters in various cities, but for Carlo’s commanding personal coolness.  She who had tamed a madman by her beauty, was outraged, and not unnaturally, by the indifference of a former lover.