He heard, in the stillness of the air and of his arrested soul, the small shrill of an insect in the wainscot. And the little fact sufficed to dissipate for the moment the extreme violence of his nervous tension, as the puncture of a needle suffices to empty a swollen bladder. Every particular of the terrible day came back to his memory: the news abruptly brought to Torretta di Sarsa, toward three in the afternoon, by a panting messenger who stammered and whimpered: the ride on horseback, at lightning speed, under the canicular sky and up the torrid slopes, and, during the rush, the sudden faintnesses that turned him dizzy in his saddle; then the house at home, filled with sobs, filled with a noise of doors slamming in the general scare, filled with the strumming of his own arteries; and at last his irruption into the room, the sight of the corpse, the curtains inflated and rustling, the tinkle on the wall of the little font for holy water. This young man’s great mistake, we are told, had been his insistence on regarding love as a form of enjoyment. He would have been in a possible relation to it only if he had learned to deal with it as a form of suffering. This is the lesson brought home to the heroine of “Il Fuoco,” who suffers indeed, as it seems to us, so much more than is involved in the occasion. We ask ourselves continually why; that is we do so at first; we do so before the special force of the book takes us captive and reduces us to mere charmed absorption of its successive parts and indifference to its moral sense. Its defect is verily that it has no moral sense proportionate to the truth, the constant high style of the general picture; and this fact makes the whole thing appear given us simply because it has happened, because it was material that the author had become possessed of, and not because, in its almost journalistic “actuality,” it has any large meaning. We get the impression of a direct transfer, a “lift,” bodily, of something seen and known, something not really produced by the chemical process of art, the crucible or retort from which things emerge for a new function. Their meaning here at any rate, extracted with difficulty, would seem to be that there is an inevitable leak of ease and peace when a mistress happens to be considerably older than her lover; but even this interesting yet not unfamiliar truth loses itself in the great poetic, pathetic, psychologic ceremonial.