When you appeared to me _there_, on the green river-banks, the line of which had cut like a knife through the horizon of all my dreams, I saw in you something radiant; I saw in you the very incarnation of my most beautiful visions. How many years had I not dreamed of you, waited for you! This delicious expectation was already beginning to be shrouded in fear and sadness, was beginning to seem altogether vague when you appeared! You were to me the whole unknown world, the wondrous world which books, dreams--heredity also--had created within me. You were the burning, the fragrant, the intoxicating whirlwind of life; you were everything my youth, my instinct, my soul, had yearned for of maddest and sweetest. Even if you had been ugly, fat, poorer than you are, I should have loved you. You had come from Rome, you were returning to Rome--that was enough! No one, neither you nor any one not born and bred in provincial remoteness, can conceive what the most paltry official from the capital--dropped by chance into that remoteness--represents to an ignorant visionary girl. How often here in Rome have I not watched the crowds in Via Nazionale, and laughed bitterly while I thought that if the lowest of those little citizens walking there, the meanest, the most anæmic, the most contemptible of those little clerks, one with an incomplete soul, dropped like an unripe fruit, one of those who now move me only to pity, had passed by on that river-bank before our house--he might have been able to awaken in me an overwhelming passion! My whole soul revolts at the mere thought. But do not you take offence, Antonio! You are not one of _those_; you were and you are for me something altogether _different_. And now, though the enchantment of my vain dreams has dissolved, you are for me something entirely beyond even those dreams. You were and you are for me, the one man, the good loyal man, the lover, young and dear, whom the girl places in the centre of all her dreams--which he completes and adorns, dominating them as a statue dominates a garden of flowers. "But our garden, Antonio, our garden is arid and melancholy. We were as yet too poor to come together and to make a garden. My eyes were blindfolded when I married you and came with you to Rome; I fancied that in Rome our two little incomes would represent as much as they represented in my country. I have perceived, too late, that instead they are hardly sufficient for our daily bread. And on bread alone one cannot live. It means death, or at least grave sickness for any one unused to such a diet. And love, no matter how great, is not enough to cure the sick one!