But Violante knew right well that Ludovico did not love her, and that there had never been any probability that he should do so; and, had she any lingering doubt on the subject, the good Assunta took very good care to dispel it.  And there was a bitterness in this knowledge which did much towards producing in Violante the state of mind that has been described.  She was not in love with Ludovico, but she had liked him—­he was the only man she had ever liked at all.  She knew that she was to be married to him if he could be persuaded to marry her, and if she were sufficiently obedient to marry him.  She thought that no man could ever love her, and she knew very certainly that this man did not.  Her own hope and firmest purpose, therefore, was, if such resistance to the higher authorities might in any way be possible to her, to avoid a marriage with Ludovico di Castelmare:  if possible to her, she would fain escape from any marriage at all.  If this should be altogether impossible, then the Duca di San Sisto, as well as anybody else.  It was not that she had any hope that the Duca di San Sisto would love her:  but, at least, it had not been proposed to him to love her, and found impossible by him to do so.  At least the unloving husband would not be the one man whom she felt she might have loved had he deemed it worth his while to ask her love.

Yet, with all this, Violante had not learned, as perhaps most women in her place would have done, to bate Ludovico for having found it impossible to love her,—­for having condemned her to feel the spreta injuria forma, which so few of the sex can ever forgive.  Had she ever reached the point of loving him it might, perhaps, have been otherwise.  As it was, she was too gentle, too humble, in her estimate of her own worth and power of attraction to be angry with him:  and yet she was sufficiently interested in the matter to listen not unwillingly to all the gossip that the Signora Assunta poured into her ear about Ludovico, tending to show that he was unworthy of pretending to her hand.

Assunta’s object, of course, was to break the match with the Marchese di Castelmare for the sake of bringing on one with the Duca di San Sisto.

Violante’s object, it has been said, was to avoid any marriage at all—­specially that immediately proposed to her; and the stories, which from time to time Assunta brought her of the goings on of Ludovico, had a double interest for Violante.  In some sort, all such intelligence was acceptable to her, as tending to make it unlikely that her only escape from a loveless marriage with him would be by her own resistance to the wishes of her family.  Yet, at the same time, it was bitter to her, and ministered an unwholesome aliment to her morbid self-depreciation.

CHAPTER XI

The Cardinal’s Reception, and the Marchese’s Ball