"When I reached home in the evening, my wife said:

"'You cannot imagine what a strange thing happened today. A lodger came to me for the room — enor-mously rich, and strange in appearance. He paid me double what I asked, and told me he wanted no food.'

"I did not understand, and asked my wife to tell me the story entire. She spoke of a splendid motorcar that stopped at the door, and of an elegant, well-bred man who stepped out of it, who was pleased with the house because there were children in it, unlike the other houses that had been offered him. Then he paid sixty liras as one month's rent.

"I said, feeling a cold current run down my spine:

"'Sixty liras — and he does not eat in the house?'

"'That is just what I found strange. He said that he wants the room only as a refuge for a few hours, away from the noise of the city; that he found the house beautiful; that he will send a furnisher to fit out the front room to his taste; and that he will receive in it a distinguished, superior person.'

"At this the blood fled from my limbs and gathered in my head. I stared at my wife, dumbfounded, and asked myself whether I had not suffered a sunstroke; then I took pity on her purity. Poor Anita — how pure she was, how clean her heart! Then I explained to her the enormity of what the man was asking; but she would not listen. She said that overstrain at work was changing my thinking, and that a well-bred man like that could not be aiming at anything base.

"I was like one seized with dizziness. I sat down on the chair and looked about me at my beautiful, orderly house; then I looked before me and saw a wife worn out with overwork, a wife grown old, with deep wrinkles about her mouth and that sadness spread over her face. I thought that she was a 'lady,' higher and loftier than all the women glittering with jewels who go about in their splendid motorcars — and that a man of the breed of the small had been able to make her that shameful offer. I clenched my fists and felt the need to crush life, and that thing of which people do not know whether it is fate — that thing like a force descending from above, annihilating. I felt the need to strike out blindly. I do not remember exactly what I said. But I saw my wife shrink back and press herself to the wall and stare at me thunderstruck, as though madness had touched me.

*

"Doctor, sir, when I think of those days, they seem to me covered with a black curtain, and I taste bitterness in my mouth. Great is this trial, to come down upon one man.....

"One Sunday I went to the sanatorium to see Carlos. I found the little one gay and strong, but the director said that he ran a fever at night; for

this they had used on him the pneumothorax — 'le pneumothorax' — and I must pay an additional sum of 1,400 piasters...

"When we were returning in the train, my wife began to talk to me fearfully, then stopping and looking out of the window at the darkness that had begun to wrap the green fields and the pretty little houses roofed with red tile. She talked and talked, and the jolting of the wheels magnified her tones:

"'Armando! Where shall we find the money needed for this month? Do you mean to borrow again? The room is still without a tenant.'

"'Armando! Carlos has no warm clothes for the cold days; I must buy him what he needs of them.'

"'Armando! I still keep that man's address. Armando, will you forgive me if I tell you that yesterday I went to him and told him I would bring you to consent — and he promised me to pay three months' rent in advance?'

"I came home with fever devouring me. I kept to my bed four days. Anita wanted to call the doctor, and I forbade her. She came and went, bringing me tea and medicine, and looking at me with the look of a beggar pleading for mercy. When I got up I asked her about the man. She said he had come one day and said he had found a room somewhere, but that he preferred our house because of the presence of the children and the presence of the sewing sign on the outer door — and this wards off suspicion.

"I looked at my wife to see whether it was really she who was reciting all these effronteries. I saw that she understood what she was saying, and that she accepted everything. She understood my look and said calmly:

"'Armando! The poor may not enjoy whatever they please. We are poor now, because of Carlos's illness and the installments on the house that must be paid every month. We are honorable people, and honorable we shall remain. Let us reckon that this room is not in our house. We rent it, and after that the lodger does with it as he pleases — we want our dignity. It is he who receives his visitors, not we! The room has an independent entrance, and we shall know nothing of anything...'

"I bowed my head, beaten, my face blazing with shame.

*

"Then workmen came, and set to plying their hammers and hanging curtains. And the furniture was brought in.

"One day Anita placed in my palm 180 liras — three months' rent.

"And from that time... a stillness took possession of