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what your vocation is.”
    You speak of all this with great ease, I replied. It is possible that I may rightly be considered a little young to marry; but that is a defect one can correct in oneself by willpower. If I had not been left in ignorance about all that you have revealed to me, I would have been neither lazy nor pedantic … I would not have allowed myself to be dragged by Uncle Tungstenius into the examination of scientific hypotheses that his life and mine could not resolve, and into which moreover I was not perhapsborne by any special genius or enthusiastic passion. I would have listened to Walter’s advice, I would have studied practical science and industrial craft: I would have made myself a blacksmith, miner, potter, geometrician or chemist; but not so many years have yet been lost. What my uncle teaches me is not useless: all the natural sciences are closely linked, and the knowledge of terrains leads me straight to the research and exploitation of useful minerals . Give me two or three years, Laura, and I shall have a position, you have my word upon it, I shall be a positive man. Can you not wait for me a while? Are you in such a hurry to marry? Have you no feelings of friendship for me?
    You are forgetting one very simple thing, Laura went on: it is that, in three years’ time, I shall also be three years older and that, consequently, there will never be the age distance between us that my father demands.
    And, since Laura laughed as she said this, I lost my temper and reproached her.
    You laugh, I said, and I suffer; but that is all the same to you, you love neither Walter nor me; you love only marriage , the idea of calling yourself “Madame” and wearing feathers in your hat. If you loved me, would you not make an effort to react against the will of a father who is probably not without feelings, and who is less wedded to his ideas than to your happiness? If you loved me, would you not have understood that I loved you too, and that your marriage to another would break my heart? You weep to leave your house in the country, and your cousin Lisbeth, and your governess Loredana, and perhaps also your garden , your cat and your canaries; but for me you have notone tear, and you ask me to be jolly so that you can forget your little customs among which my memory counts for absolutely nothing!
    And, as I was saying this with scorn, turning my empty glass round in my clenched hand, for I dared not look at Laura for fear of seeing her angered against me, I saw all at once her face reflected in one of the facets of the Bohemian crystal. She was smiling, she was wondrously beautiful, and I heard her saying to me:
    Calm yourself, you silly great child! Didn’t I tell you that I love you? Don’t you know that our earthly life is only a vain fantasmagoria, and that we are forever united in the transparent, radiant world of the ideal? Don’t you see that Walter’s earthly self is obscured by the acrid smoke from the coal, that this unfortunate has no memory , no presentiment of his eternal life, and that, while I enjoy myself on the serene heights where the prismatic light radiates the purest flames, he thinks only of burrowing into the dark shadows of stupid anthracite or into the muffled caverns where the frightful weight of galenite oppresses every seed of vitality, every flight towards the sun? No, no, in this life Walter will marry only the abyss, and I, daughter of the heavens, shall belong to the world of colour and shape; I must have palaces whose walls glitter and whose peaks shimmer in the free air and the full light of day. I sense incessant flight around me and I hear the harmonious beating of the wings of my true soul, forever borne towards the heavens; my human self could not accept the slavery of a union contrary to my true destiny.
    Walter tore me away from the delights of this vision,reproaching me for being drunk and gazing at my own image in the smoky crystal of my glass. Laura was no longer by