These and many other details Orsino wrote to Maria
Consuelo, pouring out his confidence with the assurance of a man who
asks nothing but sympathy and is sure of receiving that in overflowing
measure. He no longer waited for her answers, as the crucial moment
approached, but wrote freely from day to day, as he felt inclined.
There was little which he did not tell her in the dozen or fifteen
letters he penned in the course of the month. Like many reticent men who
have never taken up a pen except for ordinary correspondence or for the
routine work of a business requiring accuracy, and who all at once begin
to write the history of their daily lives for the perusal of one trusted
person, Orsino felt as though he had found a new means of expression and
abandoned himself willingly to the comparative pleasure of complete
confidence. Like all such men, too, he unconsciously exhibited the chief
fault of his character in his long, diary-like letters. That fault was
his vanity. Had he been describing a great success he could and would
have concealed it better; in writing of his own successive errors and
disappointments he showed by the excessive blame he cast upon himself,
how deeply that vanity of his was wounded.
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