At least the unloving husband would not be the one man
whom she felt she might have loved had he deemed it worth his while
to ask her love.
Yet, with all this, Violante had not learned, as perhaps most women
in her place would have done, to bate Ludovico for having found it
impossible to love her,--for having condemned her to feel the spreta
injuria forma, which so few of the sex can ever forgive. Had she
ever reached the point of loving him it might, perhaps, have been
otherwise. As it was, she was too gentle, too humble, in her
estimate of her own worth and power of attraction to be angry with
him: and yet she was sufficiently interested in the matter to listen
not unwillingly to all the gossip that the Signora Assunta poured
into her ear about Ludovico, tending to show that he was unworthy of
pretending to her hand.
Assunta's object, of course, was to break the match with the
Marchese di Castelmare for the sake of bringing on one with the Duca
di San Sisto.
Violante's object, it has been said, was to avoid any marriage at
all--specially that immediately proposed to her; and the stories,
which from time to time Assunta brought her of the goings on of
Ludovico, had a double interest for Violante. In some sort, all such
intelligence was acceptable to her, as tending to make it unlikely
that her only escape from a loveless marriage with him would be by
her own resistance to the wishes of her family.
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