“No, I did not do it; although I was more than hard hit. Her position was so difficult that I had no heart to make it worse; and she had a certain dignity about her, even in her moments of most childlike _abandon_ in talking with me, that prevented any light advances. You felt as though you must help her even against herself, for her nature was evidently passionate; and that made your feeling for her all the more profound. She had married unfortunately; a man who had ill-treated and neglected her in every possible way. After a couple of years she fled from her husband, left the stage, and changing her name, lived by giving singing lessons; and, when I first knew her, was making a brave struggle not only to support herself and her boy, but to obtain and hold such a position in the world as should enable her to launch him in his career. Then she fell ill; more from exhaustion of vital force than anything else; and I never saw anything like the spirit with which she bore up. She was almost too weak to teach, and held her pupils together with the greatest difficulty; yet she managed always to wear a bright smile, and she refused absolutely to give up hope. ‘Why, it is the most stimulating of medicines,’ she would say. ‘If I give up that, I shall collapse immediately. I consider that, given the conditions in which I live, self-deception, on the right side of course, is a distinct duty.’ “Towards the end of the summer she left town for a fortnight, and I went out to see her. She insisted on our having a little picnic together, and took me to the top of a hill hard by. There was a small pine wood up there, with a stretch of grass and ling. Opposite rose Castel di Poggio. The hills were round us ridge on ridge, and fold on fold; their bosoms veiled by draperies of mist, for it was still early. We might have been hundreds of miles away from any town: yet Florence was close at our feet. I had left it only a couple of hours ago, and should be down there again breathing the phenic acid of the hospital that same afternoon. Never shall I forget the morning of chat and reading (I had taken up a volume of poems—her gift), with the bees booming in the ling, the gorgeous green of the pine needles, intense unchangeable, against the brilliant sky, and the mingled scents of pine, cypress, honey-flowers, and aromatic herbs. As we were starting to go down she stopped. ‘We must keep vivid the remembrance of this, Neri,’ she said, and caught my hand. I turned and looked into her eyes, whose deep earnest gaze remains with me yet. We clasped hands, and so parted.