Nevertheless, the duty of attending
it had to be done. All Ravenna would have been astonished, and have
wanted to "know the reason why," if the Marchese had been absent
from his box on such an evening. "Society" expected it of him that
he should be there, and he had been all his life doing everything
that "society" expected of him; besides, his presence there really
was needed, and poor little Ercole Stadione would have despaired
inconsolably if he had been deprived, on such an occasion, of the
support of his great friend and patron.
But if none of these reasons had existed--if the Marchese, when he
reached the shelter of his own roof after that horrible Corso, had
been entirely free to go to bed and escape the necessity of facing
the eyes of all the world of Ravenna, which seemed to him to be from
hour to hour growing into a more terrible ordeal, would he have gone
to bed and abstained from attending the theatre?
It might have been very confidently predicted that he would not have
done so. He began, in an unreasoning animal-like sort of way, to
recognize the fact that every hour that he spent away from this
woman was bare, barren, and of no value to him at all. He was
conscious that he could be said to live only in her presence. He was
beginning to give himself up as a lost man, and to acquiesce, half-
stunned and stupid, in a fatality which he could not struggle
against.
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