n his thought,
wrath was beginning to bubble. He almost hated her on recalling the
arrogance with which she had treated him, fleeing from that room.
"Hypocrite!..." She was just amusing herself with him. She was a
playful and ferocious cat prolonging the death-agony of the mouse
caught in her claws. In his brain a brutal voice was saying, as though
counseling a murder: "This will be her last day!... I'll finish her
to-day!... No more after to-day!..." After several repetitions, he was
disposed to the greatest violence in order to extricate himself from a
situation which he thought ridiculous.

And she, ignorant of her companion's thought, deceived by the
impassiveness of his countenance, continued chatting with her glance
fixed on the horizon, talking in an undertone as though she were
recounting to herself her illusions.

The momentary suggestion of living in a cottage of Posilipo, completely
alone, an existence of monastic isolation with all the conveniences of
modern life, was dominating her like an obsession.

"And yet, after all," she continued, "this atmosphere is not favorable
to solitude; this landscape is for love. To grow old slowly, two who
love each other, before the eternal beauty of the gulf!... What a pity
that I have never been really loved!..."

This was an offense against Ulysses who expressed his annoyance with
all the aggressiveness that was seething beneath his bad humor. How
about him?... Was he not loving her and disposed to prove it to her by
all manner of sacrifices?...

Sacrifices as proof of love always left this woman cold, accepting them
with a skeptical gesture.

"All men have told me the same thing," she added; "they all promise to
kill themselves if I do not love them.... And with the most of them it
is nothing more than a phrase of passionate rhetoric. And what if they
did kill themselves really? What does that prove?... To leave life on
the spur of a moment that gives no opportunity for repentance;--a
simple nervous flash, a posture many times assumed simply for what
people will say, with the frivolous pride of an actor who likes to pose
in graceful attitudes. I know what all that means. A man once killed
himself for me...."

On hearing these last words Ferragut jerked himself out of his sullen
silence. A malicious voice was chanting in his brain, "Now there are
three!..."

"I saw him dying," she continued, "on a bed of the hotel. He had a red
spot like a star on the bandage