He took her little hand and gently kissed it with courteous reverence.
"Then--after all--you have known love!" he said in a low voice--"You have felt what it is,--though you have assumed to despise it ?" "My good Giulio, I DO despise most heartily what the world generally understands as love"-- she replied; "There is no baser or more selfish sentiment!--a sentiment made up half of animal desire and half of a personal seeking for admiration, appreciation and self-gratification! Yes, Giulio!--it is so, and I despise it for all these attributes--in truth it is not what I understand or accept as love at all--" "What DO you understand and accept ?" he asked, softly.
Her eyes shone kindly as she raised them to his face.
"Not what you can ever give, Giulio!" she said--"Love--to my mind--is the spiritual part of our being--it should be the complete union of two souls that move as one,--like the two wings of a bird making the body subservient to the highest flights, even as far as heaven! The physical mating of man and woman is seldom higher than the physical mating of any other animals under the sun,--the animals know nothing beyond--but we--we ought to know something!" She paused, then went on--"There is sometimes a great loftiness even in the physical way of so-called 'love'-- such passion as the woman we have rescued has for the man she was ready to die with,--a primitive passion of primitive woman at her best.

Such feeling is out of date in these days--we have passed that boundary line--and a great unexplored world lies open before us--who can say what we may find there! Perhaps we shall discover what all women have sought for from the beginning of things--" "And that is ?" he asked.
"Happiness!" she replied--"The perfect happiness of life in love!" He had held her hand till now, when he released it.
"I wish I could give it to you!" he said.
"You cannot, Giulio! I am not made for any man--as men go!" "It is a pity you think so"-- he said--"For--after all--you are just--a woman!" "Am I ?" she murmured,--and a strange flitting smile brightened her features--"Perhaps!--and yet--perhaps not! Who knows!" She left him puzzled and uneasy.

Somehow she always managed to evade his efforts to become more intimate in his relations with her.

Generous and kind-hearted as she was, she held him at a distance, and maintained her own aloof position inexorably.

A less intelligent man than Rivardi would have adopted the cynic's attitude and averred that her rejection of love and marriage arose from her own unlovableness and unmarriageableness, but he knew better than that.