Both temperament and his purse made him temperate in all things, and he had received a sound Christian education. He never talked about religion, but nothing scandalized him. He seldom praised and never blamed. He was almost entirely indifferent to women, flying from ugly women and blue stockings, and gratifying the passion of pretty ones more out of kindliness than love, for in his heart he considered women as more likely to make a man miserable than happy. I was especially interested in this last characteristic. We had been friends for three weeks when I took the liberty of asking him how he reconciled his theories with his attachment to Brigida Sabatini. He supped with her every evening, and she breakfasted with him every morning. When I went to see him, she was either there already or came in before my call was over. She breathed forth love in every glance, while the abbe was kind, but, in spite of his politeness, evidently bored. Brigida looked well enough, but she was at least ten years older than the abbe. She was very polite to me and did her best to convince me that the abbe was happy in the possession of her heart, and that they both enjoyed the delights of mutual love. But when I asked him over a bottle of good wine about his affection for Brigida, he sighed, smiled, blushed, looked down, and finally confessed that this connection was the misfortune of his life. “Misfortune? Does she make you sigh in vain? If so you should leave her, and thus regain your happiness.” “How can I sigh? I am not in love with her. She is in love with me, and tries to make me her slave.” “How do you mean?” “She wants me to marry her, and I promised to do so, partly from weakness, and partly from pity; and now she is in a hurry.” “I daresay; all these elderly girls are in a hurry.” “Every evening she treats me to tears, supplications, and despair. She summons me to keep my promise, and accuses me of deceiving her, so you may imagine that my situation is an unhappy one.” “Have you any obligations towards her?” “None whatever. She has violated me, so to speak, for all the advances came from her. She has only what her sister gives her from day to day, and if she got married she would not get that.” “Have you got her with child?” “I have taken good care not to do so, and that’s what has irritated her; she calls all my little stratagems detestable treason.” “Nevertheless, you have made up your mind to marry her sooner or later?” “I’d as soon hang myself. If I got married to her I should be four times as poor as I am now, and all my relations at Novara would laugh at me for bringing home a wife of her age. Besides, she is neither rich nor well born, and at Novara they demand the one or the other.” “Then as a man of honour and as a man of sense, you ought to break with her, and the sooner the better.”