Sometimes when she comes early to class and the room’s still empty, she leans her forehead against the window. The street the high school is on leads to a piazza where He – she refuses to name him – once lived. Blushing, she remembers the one time she’d entered that rented room dressed in blue and white and he’d said nervously: ‘You intimidate me.’ In the tiny space of that messy room, and in half an hour of costly spontaneity, the future that awaited her had been born and died. ‘Good day, Miss,’ one of the eighteen-year-old numbskulls greets her, the first of thirty high-school students who will enter the classroom. Today Petrarch, tomorrow Tacitus, her duties. She, who for years had contented herself with any crumb he left her, and for which she paid dearly, would not die from a lack of love. But the deprivation leads to a terrible serenity. Proudly, making fun of herself, the ‘Miss’ attends a dance or two, proof that certain dangers don’t exist for her. And, in fact, whenever she dances she never looks at her partner, never says a word, but she likes the rhythm, even if she would have preferred to dance alone, inventing steps and moves. As for her reputation for being arrogant, she explains that it’s really only shyness, but knows that her timidity is actually an intolerance for banal conversation and clumsy compliments. She often dreams of being forced to marry someone – she had no idea whom – and they meet at the altar where she is unable to dislodge a ‘no’ that strangles her. When she then awakens with a jolt, she is delighted that her freedom is still secure. If anyone hints that she is in love, she responds disdainfully and denies it completely: how could anyone possibly dare to take the place of Him, the one who had rejected her? This is more or less the reason for her outrage. Her heart shut down, she becomes a little quarrelsome and admits, annoyed, that she is attractive and turns morose when, in spite of herself, she is undermined by a spark of vanity. She is not one to accept a bourgeois marriage proposal whenever asked – such a nice young man and so in love. The word ‘Miss’ sits like a crown atop her lightly bronzed hair, and woe to anyone who dares touch it. In the meantime, as she trains for a harsh maturity, enough already with anonymous floral homages and silly notes hidden in the pages of borrowed books. Very soon she will be a respectable, old-fashioned old maid. She travels alone, goes to the theatre alone, overcomes ignoble and wretched fears when, going home, she realizes she is being followed. She has no female friends.