"I think that was the most momentous day in my life, for it wrought the greatest change in me. My eyes were opened by the peasant girl's words, and from that evening forward I regarded life quite differently. For the first time I realised the necessity to the individual to enjoy absolute personal freedom in love as in all else in life. All my previous ideas and prejudices appeared to me monstrous and iniquitous. I saw the falseness of all our ideas of morality, the absurdity of placing conventions before nature and the detestable character of our dealings with women and of our attitude in such matters. And with this suddenly awakened vision I looked anew on life, and it seemed to me that till then I had never lived. All that which I had before taken for granted I now began to question. I found that instead of thinking out life's problems for myself I had allowed myself to grow into other peoples' ideas, that I had tacitly taken for right what they had pronounced right, and for wrong what they had stigmatised as wrong. My spiritual world now turned, as it were, a complete somersault, and I was re-born a new man--an Anarchist. "I and Teresina and Giordano lived very happily for some months, much to the scandal of the narrow-minded, bigoted village folk, until I was compelled to absent myself from the country owing to some little disturbances in the neighbourhood in which I had got implicated. "Teresina followed me into exile, and with little intermission remained with me during all those early years of wanderings and adventure. She cared little about Anarchist doctrines, though herself a born rebel and an innate Anarchist. She did more for me than all the doctrines in the world. Poor child! When at last I got through all my money, and life from day to day grew harder and more precarious, food scantier, clothes raggeder, and surroundings more dangerous, she still remained faithful to me in her own way, but the life was too hard for her. We had spent the summer in Paris, and there I had got seriously implicated in a little Anarchist venture and found it necessary to flee the country with all haste. Teresina followed me into Belgium in the bitter winter weather. She died of consumption in a Brussels hospital shortly after our arrival."