The Law Inevitable. Louis Couperus

and feeling entirely impossible in the half-Italian, half-cosmopolitan set of his rather worldly mother and smart little sisters, who spent their time dancing and cycling with young Italian princes and dukes.

      And, now that he had met Cornélie de Retz, he had to confess to himself that he possessed but little knowledge of human nature and that he had never learnt to believe in the reality of such a woman, who might have existed in books, but not in actual life. Her very appearance—her pallor, her drooping charm, her weariness—had astonished him; and her conversation astonished him even more: her positiveness mingled with hesitation; her artistic feeling modified by the endeavour to take part in her period, a period which he failed to appreciate as artistic, enamoured as he was of Rome and of the past. And her conversation astonished him, attractive though the sound of it was and offended as he often was by a recurrent bitterness and irony, followed again by depression and discouragement, until he thought it over again and again, until in his musing he seemed to hear it once more on her own lips, until she joined the busts and torsos in his studio and appeared before him in the lily-like frailness of her visible actuality, against the preraphaelite stiffness of line and the Byzantine gold and colour of the angels and madonnas on canvas and tapestry.

      His soul had never known love; and he had always looked on love as imagination and poetry. His life had never known more than the natural virile impulse and the ordinary little love-affair with a model. And his ideals on love swayed in a too wide and unreal balance between a woman who showed herself in the nude for a few lire and Petrarch's Laura; between the desire roused by a beautiful body and the exaltation inspired by Dante's Beatrice; between the flesh and the dream. He had never contemplated an encounter of kindred souls, never longed for sympathy, for love in the full and pregnant sense of the word. And, when he began to think and to think long and often of Cornélie de Retz, he could not understand it. He had pondered and dreamed for days, for a week, about a woman in a poem about a woman in real life never.