Today's Stichomancy for Federico Fellini

upon our side, if we could only prove it. But it may be difficult to prove; and my advice (upon the whole) is to make a very easy bargain with your uncle, perhaps even leaving him at Shaws where he has taken root for a quarter of a century, and contenting yourself in the meanwhile with a fair provision."

I told him I was very willing to be easy, and that to carry family concerns before the public was a step from which I was naturally much averse. In the meantime (thinking to myself) I began to see the outlines of that scheme on which we afterwards acted.

"The great affair," I asked, "is to bring home to him the

Kidnapped

overhead. There was nobody about.

"No," said Hilma, at length. "I--I--I can say it for myself. I--" All at once she turned to him and put her arms around his neck. "Oh, DO you love me?" she cried. "Is it really true? Do you mean every word of it? And you are sorry and you WILL be good to me if I will be your wife? You will be my dear, dear husband?"

The tears sprang to Annixter's eyes. He took her in his arms and held her there for a moment. Never in his life had he felt so unworthy, so undeserving of this clean, pure girl who forgave him and trusted his spoken word and believed him to be the good man

of love, but the effect was not at all the same as in the country. In the town we were more vividly conscious of the wall that stood between us. I had rank and wealth, while he was poor, and he was not even a nobleman, but only the son of a deacon and a deputy public prosecutor; we both of us -- I through my youth and he for some unknown reason -- thought of that wall as very high and thick, and when he was with us in the town he would criticize aristocratic society with a forced smile, and maintain a sullen silence when there was anyone else in the drawing-room. There is no wall that cannot be broken through, but the heroes of the modern romance, so far as I know them, are too timid,

The Schoolmistress and Other Stories

Except as from the eye, in which 'tis mirrored, A ship that with the current down descends.

From thence, e'en as there cometh to the ear Sweet harmony from an organ, comes in sight To me the time that is preparing for thee.

As forth from Athens went Hippolytus, By reason of his step-dame false and cruel, So thou from Florence must perforce depart.

Already this is willed, and this is sought for; And soon it shall be done by him who thinks it, Where every day the Christ is bought and sold.

The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)