me, and I could no longer speak. I felt that my life was over.

"One night my daughter Maria said to me:

"'Dona Maud has invited me to go to the cinema with her on Tuesday.'

"My wife gave her a hard look, but the girl did not understand, and asked again:

"'Will you let me go?'

"When I went up to my room, the phantoms were dancing in my head. It seemed to me that in the rented room there was a woman with a face like the devil's face, daubed with every paint. She was sitting with my daughter on the edge of the bed, and kissing her; then my wife came and took the girl's place, and began helping the woman on with her clothes. And a dissolute man stood there, looking on...

"When Anita came up to me I seized her by the wrists and shouted:

"'The room has an independent entrance? Eh? We shall know nothing of anything! Eh? And you let our daughter talk with that woman?'

"She began to say that I was deluded, and that Dona Maud was one of her customers. But I was certain that she was lying, and that Dona Maud was the 'superior' lady whom the lodger awaited on his Wednesdays and Saturdays.

"I became like a man into whom a devil has entered, and began throwing things to the floor while Anita wept and pleaded; then I went out into the street without any aim and walked... and walked, and everyone walked with me... the trees and the people and everything. And they were all talking and accusing me, saying: 'You are a weak man, and your house is a shelter for the people of loose pleasure... for the people of loose pleasure!'

"I boarded an electric tram and got off in the heart of the city, and from there went to one of the quarters... And in a certain window there was a dark woman, one of the mulatas(1), and she beckoned to me, and I went up to her house. She was a loose woman, one of those of grease and fat and paints... I thought of Anita and said within myself:

"A family... children... one wife, the beloved of a life-time! All this has today become like everything else!

"And from that time, Doctor, sir, I felt that something within my inmost self had passed and was gone! I no longer uttered a word or asked about anything, and people began to look at me as at some

strange creature. Often, as I pass along the streets, I hear voices saying:

"'You are a lewd, brazen man!' Then I come back to myself and hear my own voice with my own ears, and look about me — and there are the passers-by, staring at me in astonishment.

"And at the garage I began to feel heavy burdens; I would stop work and sink into a world of thoughts. One day my employer called me to him and asked me what was the matter, and why my condition had changed. I answered him: they are family matters; then I went out violently, taking care that my eye should not meet that assured look — the look of the honorable man."

Then the sick man passed a handkerchief over his brow, wiping away the streaming sweat:

"Doctor, sir, I have reached a state that is hard to explain. I fancy that I suffer from my nerves, for it is not natural for a man sound of body to lose his will and to live in the state of mental torpor in which I live.

"One day I came back from my work and met that woman at the outer door. She looked at me and smiled, then bowed her head in greeting. She was not young; she had two sweet eyes and a face overflowing with softness. In the garden I met the man, and he said, in confusion: Good evening!

"I entered the house and found my wife tidying the rented front room. So I sat in the dark dining room without turning the switches of the light. I pictured Anita smoothing the sheets of the bed and arranging the pillows, and it terrified me that I did not feel that old revolt within myself, and felt no pain.

"In my days gone by I used to put things in their places... on one side was evil, and on the other side was good. The good were, in my eyes, good, and the wicked were wicked. Everything was plain, without doubt and without equivocation. And there passed through my imagination the face of Dona Anita, other than what I used to conceive it: a simple face without paints, a frank face and a steady eye. She goes out of her house and meets her lover like any loose woman, and deceives her husband.

"... And all of this goes on in my own house — mine! And I take a fee in exchange for it!

"And terror took hold of me a second time, at my own coldness before these imaginings... Suddenly I rose; I had pictured my wife's two hands smoothing the bed

of sin.