There were sad, horrible moments in this drama of the Italian winter. The
lonely house in the woods was a witness to painful, even tragic, scenes.
Viola's love for Rupert Carey was reluctant in its dawning and he could
not rise at once, or easily, out of the pit into the full starlight to
which he aspired. After the death of Sir Donald, when the winter set in,
he asked her to let him live in the house on the opposite side of the
piazza from the house in which she dwelt. They were people of the world,
and knew what the world might say, but they were also human beings in
distress, and they felt as if they had passed into a region in which the
meaning of the world's voices was lost, as the cry of an angry child is
lost in the vastness of the desert. She agreed to his request, and they
lived thus, innocently, till the winter was over and the spring came to
bring to Italy its radiance once more.
Even the spring was not an idyll. Rupert Carey had struggled upward, but
Viola, too, had much to forget and very much to learn. The egoist, spoken
of by Carey himself one night in Half Moon Street, was slow to fade in
the growing radiance that played about the angel's feet. But it knew, and
Carey knew also, that it was no longer fine enough in its brilliant
selfishness to stand quite alone. With the death of the physical beauty
there came a modesty of heart. With the understanding, bitter and
terrible as it was, that the great, conquering outward thing was
destroyed, came the desire, the imperious need, to find and to develop if
possible the inner things which, perhaps, conquer less easily, but which
retain their conquests to the end.
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