I have seen such physical jealousy in the man of feeble health of the vigorous strength of the woman whom he loved, and there is no form of jealousy more cruel or more incurable, and it is likely to become frequent in modern life, which develops the physical strength and social liberties of the female to so vast an extent. This is a painful fact, but it is one which cannot be disputed. Go wherever a crowd of both sexes congregate, and there you will see an Ippolita in all her splendid vitality and magnificent growth, and beside her, nine times out of ten, there will be a Giorgio Aurispa, small, frail, half-blind, pallid, bloodless, beardless, sickly, and prematurely decrepit. I should myself have preferred to trace the destroying influence of sensual passion eating its way gradually into the health and strength of a complete masculine sanity, and of a robust masculine health, like aquafortis biting into a copper plate. Aurispa is already mentally diseased before the fateful day on which he sees Ippolita in the dusk of the chapel in Rome. He views all things animate and inanimate, human and animal, real and ideal, through that distorted medium which the mentally deformed habitually see through as through a convex and smoked glass. He is more than feeble, he is not sane. If he had not sought death on account of his mistress, he would have done so because Demetrius Aurispa had died before by his own hand; or for some other reason which in his cerebral condition would have seemed to him imperative and irresistible, as imaginary conditions do seem to those not sane. We are told throughout the book to realise this extreme weakness, physical and moral, which ultimately drives him to destroy himself and her. '"You love life?" he murmured, with a veiled bitterness. '"Yes, life delights me," she answered, almost with vehemence. 'She had, in her voice, in her attitude, in all her person, a brightness of unusual joy and pleasure. She had in her whole aspect that satisfaction which the living creature only feels in those hours when life runs harmoniously in all its currents, in which there is a perfect balance in all the vital forces in accord with the favour and fairness of all surrounding circumstances. As in other similar moments, her whole being seemed to unclose in the freshness of the sea air, in the coolness of the summer evening, like one of those magnificent night-blooming flowers which only open the heart of their petals as the sun passes and sets.' This is one of the innumerable beautiful images in which D'Annunzio excels, and nothing can surely be finer of its kind than the whole passage which I have quoted. But it clearly proves, especially if compared with its context, that the passion which Aurispa once felt for her had now become a furious envy of her more abounding life, of her perennial and indestructible capacity of enjoyment.