But she was not listening, and she staggered off the bed, and she fell on her knees before me and begged me to tell her she was not disgusting.

‘Tell me!’ she sobbed. ‘Tell me I am beautiful like other women.’

‘Of course you are! You’re really very beautiful!’

I tried to lift her, but she clung to me frantically, and I couldn’t do anything but try to soothe her, but I was so clumsy, so inadequate, and she was so far down in the depths beyond me, but I kept trying.

Then she started again about her wounds, those ghastly wounds, they had wrecked her life, they had destroyed love before it came, driven a husband from her and into another woman’s arms, and all of this was fantastic to me and incomprehensible because she was really handsome in her own way, she was not crippled and she was not disfigured, and there were plenty of men who would give her love.

She staggered to her feet and her hair had fallen on her face, the strands of hair pasted against her tear-soaked cheeks; her eyes were blotchy and she looked like a maniac, sodden with bitterness.

‘I’ll show you!’ she screamed. ‘You’ll see for yourself, you liar! liar!’

With both hands she jerked loose her dark skirt and it fell into a nest at her ankles. She stepped out of it and she was really beautiful in a white slip and I said it. I said, ‘But you’re lovely! I told you you were lovely!’

She kept sobbing as she worked at the clasps of her blouse, and I told her it wasn’t necessary to take off any more; she had convinced me beyond a doubt and there was no need for hurting herself further.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re going to see for yourself.’

She couldn’t release the clasps at the back of the blouse, and she backed towards me and told me to unclasp them. I waved my hand. ‘For God’s sake, forget about it,’ I said. ‘You’ve convinced me. You don’t have to do a strip act.’ She sobbed desperately and seized the thin blouse with her two hands and ripped it from her with one jerk.

When she began to lift her slip I turned my back and walked to the window, because I knew then she was going to show me something unpleasant, and she began to laugh at me and shriek at me and point her tongue at my worried face. ‘Ya, ya! See! You know already! You know all about them!’

I had to go through with it, and I turned around and she was nude except for hose and shoes, and then I saw the wounds. It was at the loins; it was a birthmark or something, a burn, a seared place, a pitiful, dry, vacant place where flesh was gone, where the thighs suddenly became small and shrivelled and the flesh seemed dead. I closed my jaws and then I said, ‘What — that? Is that all, just that? It’s nothing, a mere trifle.’ But I was losing the words, I had to say them quickly or they would never form. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I hardly noticed it. You’re lovely; you’re wonderful!’