"You won't hear anything about the M---- doings, yet I assure you
they are a most serious matter. Unless I am much mistaken there is
an effort on foot to connect you with my father, which is surely
sufficiently alarming. M---- is returning to Rome, and I hear
rumours of an intention to bring pressure on some one here in
the hope of leading to identification. Think of it, I beg, I
pray!--Your friend,
"R."
VII
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.