After Owinski had engaged himself to a new fiancée, he would still, in the beginning, come at times and call upon Gina.
She would receive him with a smiling face and serene looks, and endeavour to delude him into thinking that no change had taken place, and that, if he said he had come back to her, she would be neither surprised nor dismayed. … She would talk about things which had interested them both; about her paintings and his poems. Together they read books, treating of the Beautiful, and Life, and Love. Once he said that he could not come to see her the next day, as his intended was to arrive in town; she took it as quietly as if he had announced his mother's or his sister's arrival. But, though they still called each other by their Christian names, they no longer kissed, not even at parting.
On one occasion, she asked him to read her one of his poems; a thing he was always willing to do. She listened, adapting to each changing phrase of his mind as she had used to do, and following every flash of his eye.—Now, there were many works of his with which she was not acquainted: formerly, she had been the first to read anything he wrote
