They let him out after five years (why, Heaven or the other place knows!) and he became a reformed character--the Solomon-Socrates-Senancour above mentioned _plus_ a sort of lay "director" to Lelia, with a carbonaro attitude of political revolutionary and free-thinking _illumine_. Now _corruptio pessimi_ is seldom _optima_. The main interest, however, shifts (with apparitions of Trenmor-Valmarina) to the loves (if they may be called so) of the pitiable Stenio and the intolerable heroine. She is unable to love anybody, and knows it; she can talk--ye Demons, how she can talk!--but she can never behave like a woman of this world. She alternately hugs Stenio, so that she nearly squeezes his breath out, and, when he draws natural conclusions from this process, pushes him away. But worse and more preposterous things happen. Lelia has a sister, Pulcherie, who is very like her (they are of course both impossibly beautiful) in body, and so far resembles her in mind and soul as to be unable to behave decently or sensibly. But her want of decency and sense takes the more commonplace line of becoming an actual courtesan of the "Imperia" kind in Italy. By a series of muddles for which Lelia is--as her plain-spoken sister points out after the catastrophe--herself really responsible, Stenio is induced, during the excitement of an _al fresco_ fete at night in the grounds of a sort of fairy palace, to take the "coming" sister for the recalcitrant one, and avail himself of her complaisance, _usque ad finem_. Lelia reproaches him (which she has not the least right to do), and he devotes himself entirely to Pulcherie (La Zinzolina is her professional name) and her group of noble paramours. He gets, however, generally drunk and behaves with a brutal rudeness, which would, in the Italy of tradition, have finished things up very soon by a stiletto thrust, and in honest England by a kicking into the street. There are mysterious plots, cardinals, and anything else you like or don't like. Lelia becomes an abbess, Stenio a suicide, the above-mentioned priest, Magnus, being much concerned in this. She admits her unfortunate lover to burial, and is degraded and imprisoned for it--or for having saved Trenmor-Valmarina from the law. Everybody else now dies, and the nightmare comes to an end. [Sidenote: The moral of the group and its tragi-comedy.]