In the winter, which for him began in October, he donned a greenish overcoat, and when he felt like summer had returned he would go back to wearing his famous iron gray trousers, long and tight fitting along the instep, and a black jacket cleaned each season with the help of a little benzene solvent. Only his daughter was left to him in his sad and pitiful old age. She’d resigned herself to keeping him company; and to provide her with some way of passing the time he’d take her out walking every evening along the main street. They would go up as far as the Châlet, and there, seated on a bench, in the wind or the dampness or the moonlight, they would stay awhile, silent, still, and sad, until the park was deserted.

Since Liboria was always dressed so plainly, she preferred going out in the evenings when the light from the streetlamps wasn’t so bright. Yet even then the richest girls in town found a way to make fun of her, pointing out the black feather she put on her hats, sometimes placed straight, other times to the right or to the left, in summer and winter alike, or the ribbon that served as a bow one day and a belt the next. But Liboria walked impassively with her feather and her bow, lowering her eyes and turning pale only when the Saitta girls or the baronessa Caramagna passed her since they always wore hats that seemed to fill the entire street.

She went out walking every evening, driven by the same unspoken and timid hope of finding … good Lord, she herself didn’t know what or who it was she wanted to find. When she thought about it, she would get all upset and call what she was waiting for so vaguely her “fate,” her “future.” Who knows if someone from town, or even an outsider, seeing her so serene and unpretentious, might not think of settling down? It wasn’t exactly easy, she knew that well, since these days no one can marry with nothing, but—she implied blushing to gna’ Filippa and gna’ Ntonia, who on those long afternoons would come up to the house with some excuse, lean against the doorway, and start up that same never-ending conversation—she would say, they needed to understand that a girl who knows how to run a house, who is thrifty and clean, has her dowry in hand. What good are those little butterflies who have twenty, even thirty, thousand lire and throw fifty out the window? And she timidly made note of her own case, without ever complaining about her father, while the women praised her with grand gestures that ended up raising her hopes. If not for them! Gna’ Filippa always had her eye out for a good match, and Liboria went without her glass of wine and ate less at meals so she would have something to give them.