Della Rocca rode away in the darkness, as the skirts of Madame Mila vanished in the hotel doorway with the gleam of the golden-pheasant trimmings shining under the gas lamp.
He went home to his solitary dinner, and scarcely touched it, and barely even noticed his dog. He sat alone a long time, thinking, in the same room where, four months before, he had pondered on the Duc de St. Louis's counsels, and had decided to himself that this woman, beautiful though she was, was arrogant, unimpressionable, extravagantly capricious, and in every way antagonistic to him.
Now, he was passionately in love with her himself; he knew that she was deeply moved by him; he believed that he had only to ask and have; and yet he hesitated.
It was the marriage of all other marriages for him; he had softened and subdued her in a manner which could not but intoxicate his vanity, though he had less vanity than most men; he did not distrust her character, because he believed that there was a vague lofty nobility in it, and a latent, though untouched, tenderness; of her
