She struck him as having a great love of movement, of
gaiety, of late hours, of long rides, of fatigue; an eagerness to be
entertained, to be interested, even to be bored, to make
acquaintances, to see people who were talked about, to explore the
neighbourhood of Rome, to enter into relation with certain of the
mustiest relics of its old society. In all this there was much less
discrimination than in that desire for comprehensiveness of
development on which he had been used to exercise his wit. There was a
kind of violence in some of her impulses, of crudity in some of her
experiments, which took him by surprise: it seemed to him that she
even spoke faster, moved faster, breathed faster, than before her
marriage. Certainly she had fallen into exaggerations-she who used
to care so much for the pure truth; and whereas of old she had a great
delight in good-humoured argument, in intellectual play (she never
looked so charming as when in the genial heat of discussion she
received a crushing blow full in the face and brushed it away as a
feather), she appeared now to think there was nothing worth people's
either differing about or agreeing upon.
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