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summoned up all my courage. “All right, then,” I said, “I have made love — let’s go home, Mother.”
    “Not at all, my dear!” she said authoritatively. “You’ve got to be examined.”
    Resignedly I let my skirt fall to the ground and stretched myself on the bed. The doctor examined me.
    “You were right,” he then said to Mother. “She has — now are you satisfied?”
    “How much?” asked Mother, taking out her purse. Meanwhile I slipped off the bed and put on my clothes again. But the doctor refused to take the money.
    “Do you love your fiancé?” he asked me.
    “Of course,” I replied.
    “When are you getting married?”
    “He’ll never marry her,” shouted Mother. But I replied calmly, “Soon — when we’ve got our papers ready.” There must have been so much ingenuous trust in my eyes that the doctor laughed indulgently, gave me a little pat on the cheek, and then pushed us out.
    I expected Mother to cover me with insults as soon as we reached home and perhaps even hit me again. But instead there she was, silently lighting the gas and beginning to cook me something. Sheput on a saucepan, then came into the living room and, having removed the usual bits of cloth from the end of the table, she laid a place for me. I was sitting on the sofa onto which she had dragged me by the hair a little while before and was watching her in silence. I was very much surprised, not only because she did not scold me, but because her whole face reflected some strangely unrepressed and bubbling satisfaction. When she had finished laying the table, she went back into the kitchen and after a while returned with a dish.
    “Now eat.”
    As a matter of fact, I was very hungry. I got up and went to sit down, rather awkwardly, on the chair Mother was urging me to take. There were a piece of meat and two eggs in the dish, an unusual dinner.
    “It’s too much,” I said.
    “Eat — it’ll do you good — you need something,” she answered. Her good temper was quite extraordinary, perhaps a little malicious but in no way hostile.
    “Gino didn’t think of giving you anything to eat, eh?” she added after a while, almost without bitterness.
    “We fell asleep,” I answered, “and afterward it was too late.”
    She said nothing, but stood watching me while I ate. She always did this — served me and watched me while I ate, then went to eat by herself in the kitchen. For a long time now, she had not eaten with me at the same table; and she always ate less, either my leftovers or some other food not so good as mine. I was a delicate, precious object in her eyes, the only one she had, someone to be treated with every care; and, for some time now, her flattering and admiring servility had ceased to astonish me. But now her calm satisfaction gave me an uneasy sense of anxiety.
    “You’re angry with me because we made love — but he’s promised to marry me. We’ll get married very soon,” I said after a while.
    “I’m not angry with you,” she replied immediately. “I was at the moment, because I’d been waiting for you all evening and I was worried — but don’t think about it anymore — eat.”
    Her deceptively reassuring and evasive tone, like the tone people use in speaking to children when they don’t want to answer their questions, made me even more suspicious.
    “Why?” I insisted. “Don’t you believe he’ll marry me?”
    “Yes, yes, I believe it, but go on, eat.”
    “No, you don’t believe it.”
    “I do, don’t worry — eat.”
    “I won’t eat any more,” I said, driven to the point of exasperation, “until you tell me the truth — why are you looking pleased?”
    “I’m not.”
    She picked up the empty dish and took it into the kitchen. I waited until she came back and then repeated, “Are you glad?”
    She looked at me for a long time in silence, and then answered, in a threatening, serious tone, “Yes, I’m glad.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I’m quite sure now that