The elder woman thought of her own life and compared it with what
she saw. Sold to a decrepit old husband who had worshipped her in
strange, pathetic fashion of his own, she had spent five years in
submitting to an affection she loathed, enduring it to the very
end, and sacrificing every instinct of her nature in the
performance of her duty. Liberated at last, she had given herself
up to her love for Giovanni, in a passion of the strong kind that
never comes in early youth. She asked herself what had become of
that passion, and whether it could ever be revived. In any case it
was something wholly different from the love of which Faustina was
speaking. She had fought against it when it came, with all her
might; being gone, it had left her cold and indifferent to all she
could still command, incapable of even pretending to love. It had
passed through her life as a whirlwind through a deep forest, and
its track was like a scar. What Faustina knew, she could never
have known, the sudden growth within her of something beautiful
against which there was no need to struggle, the whole-hearted
devotion from the first, the joy of a love that had risen suddenly
like the dawn of a fair day, the unspeakable happiness of loving
intensely in perfect innocence of the world, of giving her whole
soul at once and for ever, unconscious that there could be
anything else to give.
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