The travellers who run over our land and see our women laughing with wide-opened rose-red mouths upon their balconies at Berlingaccio or at Pentolaccia can never understand the immense, the inconsolable, desolation of dulness which weighs on the lives of these women in the little towns of the provinces and the country-houses of the hills and plains. They have the priest and the chapel; that is all. In Italy we have no choice between the peasant-woman toiling in the ploughed fields, and growing black with the scorch of the sun, and bowed and aged with the burdens she bears, and the ladies who live between the alcove and the confessional, only going forth from their chambers by night as fireflies glisten, and living on secret love and daily gossip. What can these do in their gaunt, dull villas--they who detest the sough of the wind and the sight of a tree, who flee from a dog and scream at a tempest, who will not read, and whose only lore is the sweet science of the passions? This I came to know later. All I saw that day, as I tramped around it wet and cold, was the gloomy evil shadow of the great place that had once been a fortress, the barred and shattered windows, the iron-studded doors, the grass-grown bastions. She had made me kill Phoebus, and yet I only lived to see her face again. Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years amidst crowds and know naught of it: then all at once you meet a stranger's eyes, and never again are you free. That is love. Who shall say whence it comes? It is a bolt from the gods that descends from heaven and strikes us down into hell. We can do nothing. I went home slowly when evening fell. I had seen her eyes across the crowd in Orte once, and once across the pool that was the Vadimon, and I was hers for evermore. Explain that, ye wise men, who in your pride have long words for all things. Nay, you may be wise, but it is beyond you. My mother and I spoke but little at this time. That home was a sad one: the death of the child and the absence of long years had left a chill in it. We ate together, chiefly in silence: it was always a pain to her that I was but Pipistrello the gymnast--not a steadfast, deep-rooted, well-loved citizen of Orte, with a trade to my hand and a place in church and market. Every day she thought I should wander again; every day she knew my savings shrank in their bag; every day she heard her neighbors say, "And your Pippo? will he not quiet down and take a wife and a calling?"