Renovales found her in the dining-room with her head in her hands,
crying, but unwilling to explain the cause of her tears. When he tried
to take her in his arms, caressing her like a child, the little woman
became as agitated as if she had received an insult.

"Let me go!" she cried with a hostile look. "Don't touch me. Go away!"

At other times he looked all over the house for her in vain, questioning
Milita who, accustomed to her mother's outbreaks and made selfish by her
girlish strength, paid little attention to her and kept on playing with
her dolls.

"I don't know, papa; she's probably crying up stairs," she would answer
naively.

And in some corner of the upper story, in the bedroom, beside the bed or
among the clothes in the wardrobe, the husband would find her, sitting
on the floor with her chin in her hands, her eyes fixed on the wall as
if she were looking at something invisible and mysterious that only she
could see. She was not crying, her eyes were dry and enlarged with an
expression of terror, and her husband tried in vain to attract her
attention. She remained motionless, cold, indifferent to his caresses,
as if he were a stranger, as if there were a hopeless gap between them.

"I want to die," she said in a serious, tense tone. "I am of no use in
the world; I want to rest."

The deadly resignation would change a moment later into furious
antagonism. Renovales could never tell how the quarrel began. The most
insignificant word on his part, the expression of his face, silence
even, was all that was needed to bring on the storm. Josephina began to
speak with a taunting accent that made her words cut like cold steel.
She found fault with the painter for what he did and what he did not do,
for his most trifling habits, for what he painted, and presently,
extending the radius of her insults to include the whole world, she
broke out into denunciations of the distinguished people who formed her
husband's clientele and brought him such profits. He might be satisfied
with painting the portraits of those people, disreputable society men
and women. Her mother, who was in close touch with that society, had
told her many stories about them. The women she knew still better;
almost all of them had been her companions at boarding-school or her
friends. They had married to make sport of their husbands; they all had
a past, they were worse than the women who walked the streets at night.
This house with all its faca