She put the ticket into the opening of her glove, and went into the first-class waiting-room. She looked about her quite indifferently, as if it was impossible that Cesare Dias or indeed any one of her acquaintance should see her there. She was conscious of nothing save a great need to go on, to go on; nothing else. It was the first time in her life that she had been out alone like this, yet she felt no surprise. It seemed to her that she had been travelling alone for years; that Cesare Dias, Laura Acquaviva, and Stella Martini were pale shadows of an infinitely distant past, a past anterior to her present existence; that they were people she had known in another world. She kept repeating to herself, like a child trying to remember a word,

"Pompeii, Pompeii, Pompeii."

But when she was climbing into the first-class compartment of the train, it seemed suddenly as if a force held her back, as if a mysterious hand forbade her going on. She trembled, and had to make a violent effort to enter the carriage, as if to brush aside an invisible obstacle. And, from that moment, a voice within her seemed to be murmuring confusedly to her conscience, warning her of the great moral crisis she was approaching; while before her eyes the blue Neapolitan coast was passing rapidly, where the wintry cold had given way to a warm scirocco. On, on, the morning train hurried her, over the land, by the sea, between the white houses of Portici, the pink houses of Torre del Greco, the houses, pink, white, and yellow, of Torre Annunziata—on, on. And Anna, motionless in her corner, gazing out of the window, beheld a vague, delicious vision of flowers and stars and kisses and caresses; and an icy terror, a sense of imminent peril, lay upon her heart. Oh, yes! In a brilliant vision she saw a future of love, of passion and tenderness, a fire-hued vision of all that soul and body could desire; yet constantly that still, small voice kept whispering to her conscience: "Don't go, don't go. If you go, you are lost　The short stories were first collected in a little volume in 1879.."

so unbearable that, when the train entered the brown, burnt-up country at the foot of Vesuvius, the country that surrounds the great ruin of Pompeii, despair was making her twist the handle of her purse violently with her fingers. The green vines and the laughing villages had disappeared from the landscape; the blue sea, with its dancing white waves, had disappeared; she was crossing a wide, desolate plain; and the volcano, with its eternal wreath of smoke, rose before her. And also had disappeared for ever the phantasms of her happiness! Anna was travelling alone, through a sterile land, where fire had passed, devastating all life, killing the flowers, destroying the people, their homes, their pleasures, their loves. And the voice within her cried: "This is a symbol of Passion, which destroys all things, and then dies itself."