No use deluding herself. Happiness has extinguished her intelligence and confines her to the role of scheming scrounger. The betrayed ‘Miss’ seeks revenge. It’s impossible to return to her former solitude, reignite her initiative, her appetite for a challenge, her steadfast ambition to prove her overlooked worth. Who have I become? A wife who doesn’t argue, attentive to every glance of fierce disapproval, to the shifting moods of a fickle largesse. Basking in the renunciation of decision-making, she no longer knows how to say ‘I like that’ or ‘I don’t like that’; she’s even unlearned how to choose, her clothes falling on to her as if by magic. Unexpected trips transform her into a small suitcase convenient to the traveller. He knows what is worth seeing and, in his hands, the world opens up, there’s nothing to do but listen and applaud. And thus France, England, Holland, the sombre Germany pass by. But suddenly, unexpectedly, something snaps: No, the young wife will not continue on to Berlin. ‘I’ve had enough,’ she declares in Munich, as she leaves the Alte Pinakothek and departs alone for Brenner. A troubled night of desolation and remorse. In Verona under a chilly sun, the ‘Miss’ reappears in front of the bronze door of the Basilica of San Zeno and before the Pisanello fresco in the church of Sant’Anastasia, pale, sad, ghostly, a shadow of herself.

It was an acrimonious trip. The sensation of having betrayed something precious plagued her, but the momentary solitude allowed her to recover some of the clarity that happiness had muddied. ‘He who hesitates is lost,’ some idiot once said, but actually this was now her situation. Going forward, she could live on her illusions – now that she knows that, from the start, the problems she faced had already been resolved. It was always a question of take it or leave it. So I fooled myself and took the wrong path. But what was my path? A deep dive into my childhood and adolescence and all would be revealed. But she didn’t want to risk concluding that if love was by now indispensable, it was insufficient, indeed, unjustifiable. Banish the dreams depleted by doubt, excited by small successes and sometimes by the certainty her goal would be achieved – these ambitions were no longer for her. But at least some autonomous occupation, something she devised for herself, which would salvage her self-esteem, save her from laziness – she contemplated this as the train carried her home, vaguely irritated by, but also vulnerable to the stares she received; alas, the habitual experience of a ‘pretty woman’. A job, a job. The most modest, the most humble, as long as it was outside the home and in no way reliant on the fact that she didn’t need to earn a living because others ‘kept’ her; she was ‘a kept woman’. Unfortunately, this banal, clichéd definition of who she was today fit her like a glove.