The Burning Secret

He was at that decisive age in which a woman begins to regret the fact of having remained faithful to a husband whom she has never wanted after all, and in which the purple twilight of her beauty grants her one last and urgent choice between maternal and feminine. Life, to which long ago it seems that all the answers have already been given, turns once more into a question, for the last time the magic needle of desire trembles, oscillating between the hope of an erotic experience and the final resignation. A woman then has to decide between living her own destiny or that of her children, between behaving like a woman or like a mother. And the baron, insightful in these matters, thought he noticed in her that dangerous vacillation between the passion to live and the sacrifice.