There is always the phenomenon of adaptation in marriage, and especially so in a mixed one like Marguerite’s and Alberto’s. And it is, most times, the woman who undergoes mutation, despite her private resolves, just because of the circumstances of life: The wife lives in the husband’s country because his work is there and so her life becomes his. Her ways of life, the foreign ones, are renounced because clinging to them in the face of different hours, language, customs, foods, friends, attitudes, and practices would be intolerably difficult.

The foreign partner gives up, one at a time, the old comforting habits and interests, and takes on the same protective coloring as her husband. Except that he is always in his ambiance, while she, fatally, is like some poor drab set off by his brilliance and preening stance; she is consort, nest warmer, and a distant, dim reflection of his coloring and glory.

They had started married life in Rome. But for the birth of their first child, Tina, Marguerite had persuaded him to find an assignment in the States. Three and a half years later, when another daughter was born, they were back in Italy. And so it went; every so often Marguerite would urge a change, and Alberto, though he would have preferred staying where he was, would always give in to her.

Marguerite began to recede from outward life and to turn back into herself. Life centered around Alberto; even her hopes and aspirations focused on him. These were the years she was also occupied with the two little girls, and Alberto left them and the management of outward life completely to her—forgetting somewhere, like an umbrella it’s a nuisance to pay attention to when skies are so clear, the inner life in her he had also pledged himself to support.

After some years, by skillful politicking in the ministries and a timely prize for his newly published study on Zanella, the Veneto poet, Alberto was rewarded with the post of cultural attaché at the Italian Embassy in Washington.

Again in the States, encountering American activism and purposeful pursuits, Marguerite found that she thirsted for them like a recluse let out of a cell. She tried gardening, the Great Books course, French lessons, helping at the library, art seminars at the National Gallery, and translating Alberto’s poetry.

Only this last enterprise had success: an irony that more puzzled than pleased her. She could do for Alberto what she couldn’t do for herself. It was some sick joke of which she was the butt—all implicit in the doomsday wedding.