Someone brought the lady a note. The lady had been waiting for it, because she hadn’t seen Nicola Rossi when she’d arrived on the morning coach. Nicola Rossi apologized for not being there, and invited the lady to come up to his hotel. Nicola Rossi was a music critic and a friend of the lady’s husband. The whole afternoon, Nicola Rossi talked about the stomach ailment that had kept him from coming to meet her. It was the altitude that gave him this trouble, and unfortunately the pharmacy in town didn’t carry effective remedies. Nicola Rossi talked about nothing else all afternoon, and in the evening the lady was grateful to the man at the opposite table for being there.

After three days, the lady had only managed to make eye contact with the man two or three times, though she hadn’t been able to hold his gaze for even an instant. Later, questioning herself about that look, which had made a distinct impression on her, the lady tried to discern some warmth in it, a flash of kindness or sensuality, but she doubted this had been the case.

A certain restlessness began to take root in the lady’s spirit. But it was still linked to a subtle joy, owed in part to the sheer difficulty of the undertaking. And yet the lady realized that this particular joy or, rather, pleasant excitement, was growing much less spontaneous, so that she had to seek it out, provoke it; and so the joy was turning less vivid, maybe even a little insincere and false.

On previous occasions, a unique quality of this joy was that the lady felt it precisely when she exchanged more or less neutral glances or words with the new individual in question. This time, though, the strangest thing was that she couldn’t feel joy in the gentleman’s presence. Meanwhile she fell prey to an inexplicable embarrassment that could only be called shyness. That was the strangest thing. The lady was certain, however, that she would regain full control once she could speak.

At this point the lady burned with curiosity to know who the man was, and what his profession might be. His anxious hands suggested a pianist, or a surgeon.

Inventing an excuse, the lady asked to see the hotel register, but all she learned was that the gentleman was forty years old. The box for profession was left blank. The lady was irked that she’d written, on her part, ‘set-designer’ – she gave advice to her architect husband – so she now replaced it with ‘painter’, which struck her as less odd. She also regretted having put down her exact age, but she didn’t dare correct it. Besides, compared to the gentleman, the lady was still quite young.

The lady had just stood up from the table and was looking, leaning against the window, at the small fields of rye rippling in the wind. The gentleman was finishing his lunch, and the window was behind his back. Now and then the lady looked away from the landscape and stared at the gentleman’s neck, which wasn’t rigid or straight, but pliant, like a boy’s. It was impossible to detect cruelty in it.