Vittoria knew how low she was sinking when she found her soul in the shallows of a sort of jealousy of Irma.

For a little space she lost all intimacy with herself; she looked at her face in the glass and swallowed water, thinking that she had strained a dream and confused her brain with it.

The silence of her solitary room coming upon the blaze of light the colour and clamour of the house, and the strange remembrance of the recent impersonation of an ideal character, smote her with the sense of her having fallen from a mighty eminence, and that she lay in the dust.

All those incense-breathing flowers heaped on her table seemed poisonous, and reproached her as a delusion.

She sat crouching alone till her tirewomen called; horrible talkative things! her own familiar maid Giacinta being the worst to bear with.
Now, Michiella, by making love to Leonardo, Camillo's associate, discovers that Camillo is conspiring against her father.