'He was a General officer in what he believed to be the army of Italy.
We used to fence together every day for two hours.'

'I love the fathers who do that,' said Vittoria.

After such speaking Ammiani was not capable of the attempt to preach
peace and safety to her. He postponed it to the next minute and the
next.

Vittoria's spirit was in one of those angry knots which are half of the
intellect, half of the will, and are much under the domination of one or
other of the passions in the ascendant. She was resolved to go forward;
she felt justified in going forward; but the divine afflatus of
enthusiasm buoyed her no longer, and she required the support of all that
accuracy of insight and that senseless stubbornness which there might be
in her nature. The feeling that it was she to whom it was given to lift
the torch and plant the standard of Italy, had swept her as through the
strings of a harp. Laura, and the horrible little bronze butterfly, and
the 'Sei sospetta,' now made her duty seem dry and miserably fleshless,
imaging itself to her as if a skeleton had been told to arise and walk:
--say, the thing obeys, and fills a ghastly distension of men's eyelids
for a space, and again lies down, and men get their breath: but who is
the rosier for it? where is the glory of it? what is the good? This
Milan, and Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Brescia, Venice, Florence, the whole
Venetian, Tuscan, and Lombardic lands, down to far Sicily, and that Rome
which always lay under the crown of a dead sunset in her idea--they too
might rise; but she thought of them as skeletons likewise. Even the
shadowy vision of Italy Free had no bloom on it, and stood fronting the
blown trumpets of resurrection Lazarus-like.