MY DANGEROUS PROGRESS

I was fairly diligent during my year of study at Padua, fairly punctual in attendance at my classes and lectures, fairly regular in my letter-writing home.  I acquired no vices, though there were plenty to be got, was not a wine-bibber, a spendthrift, nor a rake.  I was too snug in the Casa Lanfranchi to be tempted astray, and any truantry of mine from the round of my tasks led me back to Aurelia and love.  To beat up the low quarters of the town, to ruffle in the taverns and chocolate houses with sham gentlemen, half frocked abbes and rips; to brawl and haggle with vile persons and their bullies, set cocks a-fighting or rattle the dice-box in the small hours—­what were these pleasures to me, who had Aurelia to be with?  From the first she had taken her duties to heart, to mother me, to keep me out of harm’s way, to maintain her husband’s credit by making sure of mine.  These things she set herself to do with a generous zest which proved her undoing.  Slowly, and from the purest of motives, her influence upon me, her intercourse with me grew and spread.  Slowly the hours I spent with her extended—­unperceived by her, exquisitely perceived by me—­until, at the date to which I am now come, near a year after my entering the university, I may say there was not a spare moment of the day, from my rising to my going to bed, which was not passed with Aurelia.

To make the full import of this plain to the reader I must particularise to some extent.  My own rooms, I have explained, were in the same house, two storeys below the Lanfranchi apartment.  In them I was served with my chocolate by old Nonna the servant, and was understood to leave them at seven o’clock in the morning and not to return until midday, when I dined with my hosts.  The afternoons were my own.  I was at liberty to take horse exercise—­and I kept two saddle-horses for the purpose—­or to make parties of pleasure with such of my fellow-students as were agreeable to me.  At six I supped with Aurelia alone, and at seven I was supposed to retire—­either to my own room for study and bed, or into the town upon my private pleasures.  These, I say, were the rules laid down by Aurelia and her husband at the beginning of my residence in Padua.  By almost imperceptible degrees they were relaxed, by other degrees equally hard to measure they were almost wholly altered.

The first to go was the practice of taking my chocolate abed.  One morning Nonna was late, and I rose without it.  The same thing happened more than twice, so then I went upstairs to find out what had hindered her.  There I found my Aurelia fresh from Mass and market, drinking her morning coffee.  Explanations, apologies, what-not, ensued; she invited me to share her repast.  From that time onwards I never broke my fast otherwise than with her.  So was it with other rules of intercourse.  The doctor was a machine in the ordering of his life.  His chocolate at six, his clothes at eight; he left