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Elena, but a woman who turned into Via Gregoriana, walking slowly.
    What if she doesn’t come?
he mused doubtfully, drawing back from the window. And drawing back from the cold air, he felt that the tepid warmth of the room was softer, the aroma of the juniper and the roses more intense, the shadow of the drapes and the door curtains more mysterious. It seemed that in that moment the room was completely ready to welcome the desired woman. He thought about the sensation that Elena would feel upon entering. Certainly she would be won over by that sweetness, so full of memories; she would immediately lose every notion of reality, of time; she would believe herself to be back in one of their habitual trysts, never to have interrupted that sensual affair, still to be the Elena she had once been. If the theater of love was unchanged, why should love have changed? Certainly she would feel the profound seduction of the things that had once been beloved.
    Now a new torture commenced in the waiting man. The senses, heightened by the habit of contemplative fantasy and of poetic dreaming, invest objects with a sensitive and changeable soul, like the human soul; and they perceive in everything, in shapes, in colors, in sounds, in perfumes, a transparent symbol, the emblem of a sentiment or a thought; and in every phenomenon, in every combination of phenomena, they believe they can conjecture a psychic state, a moral significance. Sometimes the vision is so clear that it produces a sense of anguish in those spirits: they feel they are suffocating from the fullness of life revealed to them, and they are alarmed by their own phantasms.
    Andrea saw his own anxiety reflected in the appearance of the things around him; and as his desire dispersed uselessly in the wait and his nerves became weaker, so it appeared to him that the almost erotic essence of those things also vaporized and dissipated into futility. For him, all those objects among which he had so many times loved and taken pleasure and suffered had taken on something of his sensitivity. Not only were they witness to his loves, his pleasures, his moments of sadness, but they had participated in them. In his memory, every shape and every color harmonized with a feminine image, was a note in a chord of beauty, an element in an ecstasy of passion. By nature of his taste, he sought out multiple aspects of enjoyment in his love affairs: the complex delight of all the senses, intense intellectual emotion, abandons of sentiment, impulses of brutality. And because he sought out these things with skill, like an aesthete, he naturally drew from the world of objects a great part of his exhilaration. This delicate actor could not comprehend the comedy of love without the backdrops.
    Therefore his house was the most perfect theater; and he was an extremely skillful set designer. But he almost always invested all of himself in this artifice; he lavishly spent in it the richness of his spirit; he would sink so far into oblivion within it, that not infrequently he would be deceived by his own insidiousness, wounded by his own weapons, like an enchanter trapped within the circle of his own spell.
    Everything around him had taken on for him that inexpressible appearance of life that is acquired, for example, by sacred implements, the insignia of a religion, the instruments of a cult, every figure on which human meditation is accumulated, or from which human imagination rises toward some ideal height. Just as a vial still emits after many years the scent of the essence that was once contained in it, so, too, did certain objects still preserve even just an indistinct part of the love with which that fantasizing lover had illuminated and penetrated them. And such a strong stimulation came to him from these objects that he was disturbed by it at times, as by the presence of a supernatural power.
    It truly seemed that he knew the latent aphrodisiacal potentiality of each of those objects, and that he