Most of all her own weaknesses saddened her--the contradictions and phantasms of her sick spirit. Day by day her soul was revealed to her. She had thought herself superior, delicate, understanding; instead, she found she was cowardly and weak. She was like a tree never brought under cultivation, which might have borne good fruit, but, with its tangle of barren branches, only succeeded in throwing a pestiferous shadow. Was it her own fault? However, in measure as she learned to know herself, she tried to improve. Instinct, too, would not suffer her to persevere in a small strife, in vulgar and inconclusive affronts. The bickering ceased and a truce followed, the result of anguished incertitude and vain hope. She compared herself to a sick person, who ought to submit to a dangerous operation, and has decided to do so, in hope of regaining health, but who for the present prefers to suffer, and postpones the fateful moment. Meanwhile the outward existence of this pair followed its equable course, apparently tranquil, all compounded of sweet and monotonous habits. May died, having again become pure, blue, chilly. The sky, after a few days' rain, had taken an almost autumnal tint, beautiful and suggestive. Like a vein of milk in a poisoned flood, nostalgia for her distant home mingled with Regina's sorrow. Memory absorbed her, penetrated to her blood with the scent of the new leaves which perfumed the shining evenings in Via Balbo. During some walk to Ponte Nomentano or in Trastevere, it sufficed for the splendour of silvery green on the Aniene, or the yellow vision of the Tiber, in the depths of the green, velvety, monotonous Campagna--like the harmonies of a primitive music--to give her attacks of almost tragic homesickness. But now-a-days she knew the nature of this malady--it was the vain longing for a land of dreams lost to her for ever. She liked these little expeditions, which once she had despised, calling them the silly pleasures of little _bourgeois_ resigned to their gilded mediocrity. Sometimes Antonio proposed a walk beyond the Trastevere Station for the long, luminous afternoon; and she would meet him at the Exchange. More often they went to Ponte Nomentano, taking the baby with them, carried on the servant's arm. Antonio would amuse himself pretending to pursue Caterina; the maid would run and the baby contort herself with joy, screaming like the swifts, pink with the fearful delight of being hunted and not caught. Then Regina would linger behind, looking at the vermilion sky, the rosy lawns, the tranquil distance, all that grand country of aspect monotonous and solemn; like the life of a poet who has sung immortal songs without ever having had an adventure or committed a crime. And, watching Antonio running after his child, quivering himself with innocent joy, she once again believed herself deluded in her mistrust of him. CHAPTER VI