Her own hope and firmest purpose, therefore, was, if such resistance to the higher authorities might in any way be possible to her, to avoid a marriage with Ludovico di Castelmare: if possible to her, she would fain escape from any marriage at all.

If this should be altogether impossible, then the Duca di San Sisto, as well as anybody else.

It was not that she had any hope that the Duca di San Sisto would love her: but, at least, it had not been proposed to him to love her, and found impossible by him to do so.

At least the unloving husband would not be the one man whom she felt she might have loved had he deemed it worth his while to ask her love.
Yet, with all this, Violante had not learned, as perhaps most women in her place would have done, to hate Ludovico for having found it impossible to love her,--for having condemned her to feel the spreta injuria forma, which so few of the sex can ever forgive.

Had she ever reached the point of loving him it might, perhaps, have been otherwise.
As it was, she was too gentle, too humble, in her estimate of her own worth and power of attraction to be angry with him: and yet she was sufficiently interested in the matter to listen not unwillingly to all the gossip that the Signora Assunta poured into her ear about Ludovico, tending to show that he was unworthy of pretending to her hand.
Assunta's object, of course, was to break the match with the Marchese di Castelmare for the sake of bringing on one with the Duca di San Sisto.
Violante's object, it has been said, was to avoid any marriage at all--specially that immediately proposed to her; and the stories, which from time to time Assunta brought her of the goings on of Ludovico, had a double interest for Violante.