Next day Rossi's editorial assistant came with a troubled face. There
was bad news from the office. The morning's edition of the _Sunrise_ had
been confiscated by the police owing to the article on the King's speech
and procession. The proprietors of the paper were angry with their
editor, and demanded to see him immediately.
"Tell them I'll be at the office at four o'clock, as usual," said Rossi,
and he sat down to write a letter.
It was to Roma. The moment he took up the pen to write to her the air of
the room seemed to fill with a sweet feminine presence that banished
everything else. It was like talking to her. She was beside him. He
could hear her soft replies.
"If it were possible to heighten the pain of my feelings when I
decided to sacrifice my best wishes to my sense of duty, a letter
like your last would be more than I could bear. The obstacle you
deal with is not the one which chiefly weighs with me, but it is a
very real impediment, not altogether disposed of by the sweet and
tender womanliness with which you put it aside. In that regard
what troubles me most is the hideous inequality between what the
man gives and what he gets, and the splendid devotion with which
the woman merges her life in the life of the man she marries only
quickens the sense of his selfishness in allowing himself to
accept so great a prize.
"In my own case, the selfishness, if I yielded to it, would be
greater far than anybody else could be guilty of, and of all men
who have sacrificed women's lives to their own career, I should
feel myself to be the most guilty and inexcusable. My dear and
beloved girl is nobly born, and lives in wealth and luxury, while
I am poor--poor by choice, and therefore poor for ever, brought up
as a foundling, and without a name that I dare call my own.
"What then? Shall such a man as I am ask such a woman as she is to
come into the circle of his life, to exchange her riches for his
poverty, her comfort for his suffering? No.
"Besides, what woman could do it if I did? Women can be unselfish,
they can be faithful, they can be true; but--don't ask me to say
things I do not want to say--women love wealth and luxury and
ease, and shrink from pain and poverty and the forced marches of a
hunted life. And why shouldn't they? Heaven spare them all such
sufferings as men alone should bear!
"Yet all this is still outside the greater obstacle which stands
between me and the dear girl from whom I must separate myself now,
whatever it may cost me, as an inexorable duty. I entreat you to
spare me the pain of explaining further. Believe that for her sake
my resolution, in spite of all your sweet and charming pleading,
is strong and unalterable.
"Only one thing more. If it is as you say it may be, that she
loves me, though I had no right to believe so, that will only add
to my unhappiness in thinking of the wrench that she must suffer.
But she is strong, she is brave, she is the daughter of her
father, and I have faith in the natural power of her mind, in her
youth and the chances of life for one so beautiful and so gifted,
to remove the passing impression that may have been made.
"Good-bye yet again! And God bless you! D.
"P. S.--I am not afraid of M----, and come when he may, I shall
certainly stand my ground. There is only one person in Rome who
could be used against me in the direction you indicate, and I
could trust her with my heart's blood."