I was an honest lad, very serious and very simple. Perhaps I was a
fool, but I was a pure fool: and he had been a very monster of depravity
who could have cast unwholesome regard upon a welcome so generous and
modest as hers. I declare that she was never anything to me but a holy
emanation, not to be approached but on the knees, not to be looked upon
but through a veil. So from this page until near the end of my long
history she will appear to the reader. I never had an unworthy thought
of her, never an unworthy desire. I never credited her with more than
charity towards myself; and if I gloried in the fact that I was
privileged to love so wondrous a being, the thought humiliated me at the
same time. I was conscious of my nothingness before her worthiness, and
desperate to fit myself for her high society. A noble rage for
excellence possessed me; like any champion or knight of old I strove to
approve my manhood, only that I might lay the spoils of it at her sacred
feet.
By origin Aurelia was a Sienese, the daughter of the ancient, noble but
reduced family of Gualandi, and had, without knowing it, caught the
fancy of Dr. Lanfranchi when he was in her native city upon some
political question or another. At the age of eighteen she had been made
the subject of a marriage treaty between her mother and this learned man
of fifty--a treaty conducted by correspondence and without any by-or-
with-your-leave of hers.
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