What would Fulvia’s marriage--her so-called marriage--make of her? It was bound to work some great change or development in her character. Would it ripen her early into a more than usually noble woman, proud and reticent, suffering and strong? Would it crush her into a hopeless slave, terrified and cowering before the tyrant to whom she was tied? Or would it harden her into marble, stiffen all her girlish brightness into a chilly glitter of the conventional, professional cheerfulness all must wear, unless they wish the world to invent the most wonderful calumnies concerning them and their lives? For it is true that the inwardly unhappy, in certain circumstances, must either calumniate themselves or be calumniated by others. Minna could form no idea on the subject. She would have given a good deal to learn something about it, but no sign came. There was no news--no word of Fulvia, who had disappeared utterly when she had departed with Marchmont for Milan on their way to London. Minna’s state of mind grew more and more anxious, more and more perturbed, as time went on, and the day beyond which her departure must no longer be delayed approached with remorseless rapidity. She was longing to leave Rome--to breathe an air which was not tainted with the horrors and the sins of thousands of years, horrors and sins which had never troubled her till the one horror, the one sin, was perpetrated which went home to her and appealed to her. Now it seemed to her, when she walked abroad, threading the narrow streets, or passing under or beside the awful piles of ruin, as she glanced at the hoary grayness of the Forum, looking ashen and ghastly in the dazzling May sunshine, as she looked upwards at the grim frown of the overhanging fragments of the Palatine, that the whole place reeked with sin and crime, and with the deadly odour of shameful bargains and sales of human bodies and souls. It was morbid, she felt, or tried to feel, but it was very strong and very real; and, returning one Friday evening from the comparative cool of Doria Pamfili gardens, into the odours and the noises of the teeming streets below, she was suddenly seized with a wild, unreasoning craving after a breath of the air, fresh from the moor, salt from the sea, which she knew was blowing round her old gray house far in the North, at home. The everlasting glare of blue and gold in the sky and sun oppressed her; the voluptuous languor of the nights, loud with music and vocal with thrilling notes of song, made her feverish and restless. Had she followed her own impulse, she would have fled within a few hours, nor ever rested till the Alps were between her and this great insolent sorceress city. She could not fly. Business still tied her for a few days, and the idea that there was someone somewhere within those mazes of streets with whom she had clasped hands in friendship, and whose misery was to her nervous unrest as the ocean compared to a fretting brooklet, was a torment to her.