"I had not finished," Polia broke in. "You are overscrupulous, but I understand your scruple and share it. The world as it goes demands odd sacrifices and one would perhaps be asked of you by reason of your character, but a character of the same calibre as yours might answer with a different sort of denial. Greatness and fortune are accidents of fate one can get rid of if one wants to. The artist and the poet are everywhere the same. Everywhere they have success and glory, but beyond an arm of the sea the woman who is rich and titled who has known how to shake off these vain privileges of birth is no more than a woman. If this woman came to say to you: I renounce my greatness, I abandon my fortune, I am ready to become even humbler and poorer than you, and to commit to your charge, as to my sole source of support, the whole of my life's destiny, what would you say to that, Francesco?" "I would fall at her knees," said Francesco, "and answer thus: Heavenly angel, keep the rank and the advantages that heaven has conferred on you; you must be and stay what you are, and the wretch who would be capable of letting himself be carried along by this tender and sublime urge of your heart would never have deserved to occupy a place in it. He can no longer raise himself up to you except by constant resignation, easy for one who hopes, and especially for one who is loved. It is not I who would make you come down from the position in which God did not put you without a motive, in order to submit you to the varying fortunes of an anxious existence, poisoned by needs incessantly renewed, and perhaps one day by incurable regrets. My happiness is complete now. It exceeds all my hopes since you have granted to me all that you could take from the duties that your name imposes on you. You love me, I'd add, and you will always love me since you have not recoiled from resolving to give your life to mine. Your life, my beloved, I accept and take as a sacred pledge for which I will render an account before my Lord and Judge, for life is short, even for those who suffer, whatever weak hearts have to say about it. This earth is just a place of transit where souls come to be tested, and if your soul, as faithful as it is devoted, stays married to mine during the years that time still allows us, the whole of eternity is ours..." Polia was silent for a time. "Yes! Yes!" she exclaimed exaltedly. "God has not instituted a holier or more inviolable sacrament. It is in this way that a love such as yours must have reconciled its hopes and its duties in a marriage of the heart that the rest of mankind does not know, and your heavenly spouse would speak to you as I speak to you if she had heard you." "She has heard me, Polia," Francesco replied, letting his head at that moment fall into his hands with a torrent of tears.