She
never even asked herself the question, whether it would not be better
and easier to end all and leave Gregorio to his fate. Gregorio! Her
smooth lip curled in contempt. A coward, a thief, a fool--why should she
care what became of him? Coldly and sincerely she wished that she were
going to kill him, and not Veronica. She despised the one, and hated the
other; of the two, she would rather have let the hated one live. But to
die herself seemed absurd to her, because she really feared death with
all her heart, and clung to life with all her strong, vital nature. If
the lives of all Naples could have saved her own, death should have had
them all, rather than take hers. To live was a passion of itself--even
to live lonely, with a despicable and hated companion in the
consciousness of the enormous and irrevocable crime by which that living
was to be secured to her.
There was a common, straight-backed chair in the room, between the chest
of drawers and the wall. Through that interminable half-hour she sat
upright upon it, her hands folded upon her knees, quite cold and
motionless, her eyes closed, and her lips parted in an expression of
bodily pain. Then she rose suddenly, all straight at once, tall and
unbending, and stood still while one might have counted ten, and she
opened and shut her eyes slowly, two or three times, as though she were
comparing the outer world with that within her. So Clytemnestra might
have stood, before she laid her hands to the axe.
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