Farfadetti, ' you who have given me everything, you whose soul is so marvelously twin with mine, you must give me something of yourself that I have
not yet had, and from the lack of which I am dying. ' ' Is it, then, my life that you ask? ' said the painter; ' it is yours; you can take it.' ' No, it is not your life; it is more than your life; it is your wife! ' ' Botticellina ! ' cried the poet. ' Yes, Botticellina; Botticellinetta; flesh of your flesh, the soul of your soul, the dream of your dream, the magic sleep of your sorrows! ' ' Botticellina! Alas! Alas! It was to be. You have drowned yourself in her, she has drowned herself in you, as in a bottomless lake, beneath the light of the moon. Alas! Alas! It was to be.' Two tears, phosphorescent in the penumbra, rolled from the
eyes of the painter. The poet answered: ' Listen to me, oh! my friend! I love Botticellina, and Botticellina loves me, and we shall both die of loving one another, and of not daring to tell one another, and of not daring to unite. She and I are two fragments, long ago separated, of one and the same living being, which for perhaps two thousand years have been seeking and calling one another,
and which meet at last to-day. Oh! my dear Pinggleton, unknown life has these strange, terrible, and delicious fatalities. Was there ever a more splendid poem than that which we are living to-night? ' But the painter kept on repeating, in a
