In other circumstances of fortune he might have become eminent as a man of letters.

Without possessing any of that practical, masculine knowledge of women, which Taquisara so roughly expressed, Gianluca had a keen and sure understanding of the feminine mind.

There is no contradiction in that, for the men who know something of women's hearts by instinct and experience are by no means always those who are in intellectual sympathy with them.

Very young women are sometimes surprised when they discover this fact, but men generally know it of one another; and the man of whom other men are jealous is rarely the one who prides himself upon knowing and sympathizing with the feminine point of view on things in general, from literature to dress.
Gianluca had talked with Veronica about all sorts of subjects, and she had often asked him questions which he had not been able to answer on the spur of the moment.

It was easy for him, in his first letter, to hark back to one of those idle questions of hers, and to make his reply to it an excuse for a letter.