At the hospital, where Djuna sometimes accompanied her, the nurses and doctors no longer listened to her. Djuna caught glances of irony in the doctor's eyes.

Zora's gestures to describe her troubles became for Djuna a special theatre of exaggeration, which at first caused terror, and then numbed the senses.

It was like the Grand Guignol, where knowing every scene was overacted to create horror finally created detachment and laughter.

But what helped Djuna to overcome her terror was something else which happened that winter: there was an epidemic of throat infection which swept Paris and which Djuna caught.

It was painful but came without fever, and there was no need to stay in bed.

That same day Rango rushed to the barge, distressed and vehement. He could not stay with Djuna because Zora was terribly ill. "You might come back with me, if you wish. Zora has a heart attack, an inflamed throat, and she's suffocating."

When they arrived, the doctor was there examining Zora's throat. Zora lay back pale and rigid, as if her last hour had come. Her gestures, her hands upon her throat, her strained face were a representation of strangulation.

The doctor straightened up and said: "Just the same throat infection everybody has just now. You don't have to stay in bed. Just keep warm, and eat soups only."

And Djuna, with the same throat trouble, was out with Rango.

The first year Djuna had suffered from Rango's panic. The second year from pity; the third year detachment and wisdom came. But Rango's anxiety never diminished.

Djuna awakened one morning and asked herself: "Do I love this woman who magnifies her illness a thousand times, unconcerned with curing it, but savoring its effect on others? Why does Zora contort herself in a more than life-size pain for all the world to see and hear?"

Many times Djuna had been baffled by the fact that when someone said to Zora, "You look better, so much better," Zora was not pleased. A frown would come between her eyes, an expression of distress.

At the hospital one day, the doctor did not linger very long at Zora's bedside, and when he walked away Djuna laid her hand on his arm: "Please tell me what's the matter with my friend?"

"She's a pathological case," he said.

Djuna saw the second face of Zora.

It was an expression she had seen before and could not place. And then she remembered.

It was the expression upon the face of professional beggars.

Her enumeration of the troubles she had endured that day was like the plaintive incantation too perfectly molded by time and repetition.

Under the tone of sorrow there was a practice in the tone of sorrow.

Yet Djuna felt ashamed to doubt the sincerity of Zora's complaints, as one is ashamed to doubt a beggar's poverty. Yet she felt, as one does occasionally before a beggar, that a pain too often studied for public exposure had become a pain necessary to the beggar, his means of livelihood, his claim to existence, to protection. If he were deprived of it, he would be deprived of his right to compassion.