Italy--if the verdict was in their favor it meant Italy. The word had
become a sort of talisman to him, a land where the intolerable anxieties
of life would fall away like an old garment. They would go to the
watering-places first and among the bright and colorful crowds forget
the gray appendages of despair. Marvellously renewed, he would walk
again in the Piazza di Spanga at twilight, moving in that drifting
flotsam of dark women and ragged beggars, of austere, barefooted friars.
The thought of Italian women stirred him faintly--when his purse hung
heavy again even romance might fly back to perch upon it--the romance of
blue canals in Venice, of the golden green hills of Fiesole after rain,
and of women, women who changed, dissolved, melted into other women and
receded from his life, but who were always beautiful and always young.
But it seemed to him that there should be a difference in his attitude.
All the distress that he had ever known, the sorrow and the pain, had
been because of women. It was something that in different ways they did
to him, unconsciously, almost casually--perhaps finding him
tender-minded and afraid, they killed the things in him that menaced
their absolute sway.
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