"Alas! as I repeat, I am sick! The shock of reality, the hardness of that daily bread, has produced in me a sort of moral anæmia; and the disease has become so acute that I can't get on any longer. For me this life in Rome is a martyrdom. It is absolute necessity that I should flee from it for a time, retire into my den, as they say sick animals do, and get cured--above all, get used to the thought, to the duty, of spending my life like this. "Antonio! my Antonio! force yourself to understand me, even if I don't succeed in expressing myself as I wish. Let me go back to my nest, to my mother! I will tell her I am really ill and in need of my native air. Leave me with her for a year, or perhaps two. Let us do what we ought to have done in the first instance, let us wait. Let us wait as a betrothed couple waits for the hour of union. I will accustom myself to the idea of a life different from what I had dreamed. Meanwhile your position (and perhaps mine, too, who knows?) will improve. Are there not many who do this? Why, my own cousin did it! Her husband was a professor in the Gymnasium at Milan. Together they could not have managed. But she went back home, and he studied and tried for a better berth, and presently became professor at the Lyceum in another town. Then they were re-united, and now they're as happy as can be. "'But,' you will say, 'we _can_ live together. We have no lack of anything.' "'True,' I repeat, 'we don't lack for bread; but one cannot live by bread alone,' Do you remember the evening when I asked you whether from our habitation you could see the Great Bear? You laughed at me and said I was crazy; and who knows! perhaps I am really mad! But I know my madness is of a kind which can be cured; and that is all I want, just to be cured--to be cured before the disease grows worse.