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Malignity, itself at bay, was forced to recognize and avow that in the Duchess of Reggio no other stain could be found than the ink-stains she sometimes allowed her pen to make upon her finger. In her greatness, this noble woman saw, before all, the side of duty."
Ambrose was sailing the next morning. Not long afterward I saw the library table with the helmeted knights standing before an auctioneer's door in University Place; and I looked with a pang at the familiar ink-stains, in which I had so often traced the geography of Paul's visionary world.
I felt myself blushing. "There must be," thought I, "some law against ink-stains, some decree, some regulation, something drawn up for the protection of Early Texts. And the penalty is bound to be terrible, since it has been enacted by the learned; expulsion, no doubt, besides a fine an enormous fine. They are getting ready over there to fleece me.
Thenceforward he reverted to his usual indifference about appearances, his only vanity being the spotless cleanliness of his working costume a loose dressing-gown of white flannel or cashmere, made like the habit of a Benedictine monk, which was kept in round the waist by a silk girdle, and was always scrupulously guarded from ink-stains.
For me a law is a green baize table, sealing-wax, paper, pens, ink-stains, green-shaded candles, books bound in calf, papers yet damp from the printer's and all smelling of printer's ink, conversations in green papered offices, files, bundles of documents, a stuffy smell, speeches, newspapers; a law, in short, is all the hundred and one things, the hundred and one tasks you have to fulfil at all hours, the grey and gentle hours of the morning, the white hours of middle day, the purple hours of evening, the silent, meditative hours of night; tasks which leave you no soul to call your own and rob you of the consciousness of your own identity.
Together they seemed to form a lulling draught for her senses; Susan felt as if undue cold, undue heat, haste and worry and work, the office with its pencil-dust and ink-stains and her aunt's house, odorous, dreary and dark, were alike a half-forgotten dream.
You see I am very comfortably settled in my big by-by and I do not want to have any ink-stains. The fire sparkles on the hearth, the street is silent; let us forget that George will not return till midnight, and turn back to the past. I can not recall the first month of that dear past without laughing and weeping at one and the same time. How foolish we were! How sweet it was!
The spell is broken, and the melody of her nature, which formerly revealed glorious things, is now prostituted to complaints about broken soup-plates or ink-stains in new linen. Happy is the composer who never again so long as he lives sets eyes upon the woman who by virtue of some mysterious power enkindled in him the flame of music.
Externally the book showed manifest traces of a schoolboy's ownership, in broken corners; plentiful ink-stains, from exercises and punishments; droppings of illicit candle grease, consumed long after curfew-time; round marks like fairy rings on a greensward, which indicated the standpoint of extinct jam pots where are those jam pots now?
And now, in the afternoon, I felt as if I had been in this long, rambling, tumble-down Villa of Mistra a villa three-quarters of which was given up to the storage of grain and garden tools, or to the exercise of rats, mice, scorpions, and centipedes all my life; as if I had always sat there, in Count Alvise's study, among the pile of undusted books on agriculture, the sheaves of accounts, the samples of grain and silkworm seed, the ink-stains and the cigar-ends; as if I had never heard of anything save the cereal basis of Italian agriculture, the diseases of maize, the peronospora of the vine, the breeds of bullocks, and the iniquities of farm laborers; with the blue cones of the Euganean hills closing in the green shimmer of plain outside the window.
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