Passion will choose
his own time to rush upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind,
when an appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his
appearance. So was it now with Giovanni. Day after day, his pulses had
throbbed with feverish blood, at the improbable idea of an interview
with Beatrice, and of standing with her, face to face, in this very
garden, basking in the oriental sunshine of her beauty, and
snatching from her full gaze the mystery which he deemed the riddle of
his own existence. But now there was a singular and untimely
equanimity within his breast. He threw a glance around the garden to
discover if Beatrice or her father were present, and perceiving that
he was alone, began a critical observation of the plants.
The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their
gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There
was hardly an individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself
through a forest, would not have been startled to find growing wild,
as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of the thicket.
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