"What have you done to me, Agostino?"
I dropped my glance before her languid eyes. "What I have done to no other
woman yet," I answered, a certain gloom creeping over the exultation that
still thrilled me. "0 Giuliana, what have you done to me? You have
bewitched me; You have made me mad!" And I set my elbows on my knees and
took my head in my hands, and sat there, overwhelmed now by the full
consciousness of the irrevocable thing that I had done, a thing that must
brand my soul for ever, so it seemed.
To have kissed a maid would have been ill enough for one whose aims were
mine. But to kiss a wife, to become a cicisbeo! The thing assumed in my
mind proportions foolishly, extravagantly beyond its evil reality.
"You are cruel, Agostino," she whispered behind me. She had come to lean
again upon the back of the bench. "Am I alone to blame? Can the iron
withstand the lodestone? Can the rain help falling upon the earth? Can
the stream flow other than downhill?" She sighed. "Woe me! It is I who
should be angered that you have made free of my lips. And yet I am here,
wooing you to forgive me for the sin that is your own."
I cried out at that and turned to her again, and I was very white, I know.
"You tempted me!" was my coward's cry.
"So said Adam once.
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