The woman turned toward me, saying... "That is Jenny... the vilest creature I have known on the face of the earth... an Italian—a pit of rot... I am convinced she pushed me into carrying the liras so as to spring the trap on me... She is jealous... the most jealous of them all..."

And I asked her, "Is she not your colleague?"

"My colleague? Ha—yes, she is my colleague. This troupe—it is the wonder of wonders... with the human specimens it contains... I have realized at last that I entangled myself by join-ing it... It would have profited me more to stay in Germany and suffer what my grandmother and my brother Karl suffer... and that young man who was my sweetheart..."

"And why did you leave them...?"

She opened her wide gray-blue eyes to their fullest and answered:

"No—I will not pretend to you that it was the fever of art, as all the women of the troupe say; nor will I say it was a man's decep-tion that shut all the doors of life before me except this one door. No—that is a tale every one of them knows by heart... and few, only a few, admit that destitu-tion and want drove them to this fate. The motive is simpler and stronger than all of that. We had to eat... my grandmother and Karl and I... or else waste away as thousands of others imagine wasting away. And my stomach could not endure hunger.

"My feet were all but torn to pieces without shoes. We shel-tered in a house that had, of the semblance of a dwelling, totter-ing walls and a roof in which the bombs of the war had left more than one gap. My grandmother was an old woman, and my brother a small, upright boy who did not know how to steal food from the camps of the American army... so there was no one but me. And what, pray, was I expected to become?? There was

nothing before me—and before dozens of others—but this fate, and we flung ourselves upon it in the name of art. And what art!... I signed a contract with Bruno, the Italian manager of the troupe, and I toured with his troupe through Greece and Turkey and Egypt and Cyprus and everywhere... And here I am... I was told at the beginning, You will grow rich... a year... two years—or thereabouts—and you will go home with a fortune... And now a year and a half have gone by, and I have nothing but these many loathsome clothes that I don't know what to do with... Not all of them are like me, of course... the hands of others sag under jewels and trinkets, and their pockets bulge with money... I was told that I am a fool who has not mastered the arts of opportunism. That is what I am in their eyes; but in my own eyes I am a human being holding fast to a remnant of dignity, one that scorns to clean out the pockets of every swine whom circumstance tosses into her path. At first I used to quarrel with Bruno whenever he prescribed for me a certain conduct with one of those old men who drag their humanity in the dust at our feet... How I despised them, how they revolted me—careless of Bruno's threats to throw me out... I knew I was the best face in the troupe... and the first to turn the heads of its foolish customers with their red eyes and their sagging paunches... Isn't that hideous...?

"In this milieu the world opened itself to me a great deal... strange sorts of people, whose souls I came to know stripped bare of those veils they labor to manufacture—for they are betrayed by those moments when their natures desert them, and they appear as nothing more than animals... in one great pen.

"I came to know every-thing—except riches. And I woke to this frightful truth...

What lies behind my life? Have I taken the price of what I gave? No. A losing trade, in which I spent my dignity and my health and my spirit... and came out with nothing... nothing at all, except a great hatred of life.

"And I asked myself... why should I not be like Jenny—a drain that is never filled... why not live in that spirit for a year, or two, or three, then go back with a fortune to my grandmother and to little Karl—and look about for some foolish young man willing to tie his fate to mine, now that the first one has flown from me?

"And I hunted my victims. Fools. Old men clinging to the fringes of youth with a laughable stubbornness... The last of them was a rich man who drowned me in everything I desired. Clothes. Jewels. Money. In two months only, I gathered from him these accursed gold liras... For their sake I endured his heaviness and his dullness and his insistence that I look at no one but him—just as he endured from me my contempt and my whims and my persistence in humiliat-ing him... And I would remem-ber my purpose, and draw back, and soften, and make peace.

"I had to come out with some-thing. I was done with him, and I carried off my harvest—and then it was scattered. My money was confiscated to the last lira. And I am left poor, carrying my misery to every place—and spitting out my vileness—yes, for I have become vile like the others—at every man. How horrible this is... how horrible, to go back to the starting point, and to live forever, an animal in this great pen..."

The woman's tongue ceased its speech, and her tears began again to well from her eyes, her body trembling nervously... And I stood at a loss what to say... for a word from me would not give back to this wretched creature her faith in the justice of life.