1
For some time my friend Doro and I had agreed that I would be his guest. I was very fond of Doro, and when he married and went to Genoa to live, I was half sick over it. When I wrote to refuse his invitation to the wedding, I got a dry and rather haughty note replying that if his money wasn't good for establishing himself in a city that pleased his wife, he didn't know what it was good for. Then, one fine day as I was passing through Genoa I stopped at his house and we made peace. I liked his wife very much, a tomboy type who graciously asked me to call her Clelia and left us alone as much as she should, and when she showed up again in the evening to go out with us, she had become a charming woman whose hand I would have kissed had I been anyone else but myself.
I happened to be in Genoa several times that year and always went to see them. They were rarely alone, and Doro with his free and easy manner seemed entirely at home in his wife's world. Or perhaps I should say that his wife's world had seen their own man in Doro and he had played along, careless and in love. Once in a while he and Clelia would take the train and go off somewhere, a kind of intermittent honeymoon. This went on for about a year. But they had the tact not to say much about it. I, who knew Doro, appreciated this silence, but I was envious too. Doro is one of those people who stop talking when they are happy, and to find him always contented and absorbed in Clelia made me realize how much he was enjoying his new life. It was rather Clelia who told me one day, after she had begun to feel easier with me, when Doro had left us alone: "Oh, yes, he is happy"—with a furtive but irrepressible smile.
They had a small villa on the Genoese Riviera, where they often went on their expeditions. This was the villa where I was supposed to be their guest, but during that first summer my work took me elsewhere, and then I must add that I felt a little embarrassed at the idea of intruding on their privacy. On the other hand, to keep on seeing them as usual, always among their Genoese friends, passing breathlessly from one conversation to another, to have to keep up with them on these hectic evenings was scarcely worth the trouble,- going all that way just to get a glimpse of him or exchange a few words with her. My trips became fewer and I began to write letters—formal notes with a little gossip added now and then, to serve as best they could in place of my old companionship with Doro. Sometimes it was Clelia who answered—a quick, open handwriting, cheerful bits of news intelligently chosen from a mass of varied thoughts and events that belonged to another life and another world. But I had the impression that it was in fact Doro in his indifference who left the responsibility to Clelia, which irritated me, so that without even any special pangs of jealousy I neglected them even more. In the space of a year I may have written perhaps three more times, and one winter I had a surprise visit from Doro, who for a whole day didn't leave me alone for one hour, talking about his affairs—he came for this—but also of our good old times together. He seemed more expansive on this occasion, logically enough, considering our long separation. He renewed his invitation to spend my holidays with them at their villa. I told him I would accept on the condition that I live by myself at a hotel and see them only when we were all in the mood for it. "Fine," Doro said, laughing. "Do what you like. We don't want to eat you." Then for almost another year I had no news, and when midsummer came, I happened to be free and without any special plans. So I wrote to see if they wanted to have me. A telegram shot back from Doro: "Stay where you are. Am coming to you."
2
When he was there in front of me, looking so sunburned and summery that I almost didn't recognize him, my anxiety changed to annoyance.
"This is no way to behave," I told him. He
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