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By Root 1324 0

hat with his forearms, like a shield over his belly, clasping the big fingers of his two hands, which sank into his lap. The second ward, already twenty or twenty-one years old, was Ines, and she, after a little while, had gone off to be married: a wedding that was all in order. She had married a fine young man from Rieti, son of property owners, a law student in his eighth year of college: the full course lasted ten. One fine day, just when Liliana's tendernesses were condensing over her head, she had suddenly come out with the information that "she wanted to follow her vocation." And she followed it: with excellent results. From the daughterly, and urban, adventure, she had extracted a bit of a dowry, had collected a hope chest: two big suitcases full of lace-edged linen. Affected, as she was, by a classic form of wifely foresightedness, not, however, of the grasping form of her predecessor, she had been able to captivate wholly the stepmotherly heart, so maternal, or so gently sister-like (Liliana was eight or nine years older than she) and had acted with stubborn assiduousness in infallible determination, minute by minute, and in the systematized premeditation of her every gesture or smile or word or whim or glance or kiss: those which distinguish the tacit will of the woman, when she has "character": a past mistress, on occasion, in prompting the thought without even giving its outline verbally: with hints, lateral tries and counter-tries, mute waiting: setting off a process of induction, like the stator of a generator: with the same technique whereby she is wont to surround and protect (and direct towards the Right) the first stumbling steps of a little one: channeling it, however, where she wants, which is where he can wee-wee in the most seemly way, and with utter relaxation.

Ines! The urban adventure! From Galilei's{29} matutinal clarities, when the Lateran office and mystery, the green gaiety of the churchyard receive within the city's walls the hick with his devout Sign of the Cross, the ass hitched up for a moment, gee!, from the golden pomp, at vespers, or ruby-colored, and from the full cavate of Maderno, from whose archway the indelible hymn in praise of Mary Mother has burst into the centuries never to return; from the PV and the BM and from the ten holes in the disk of the telephone, and from the big box of the radio which she put out of commission four times, the cothurnate fore-thinker had taken home a certain brisk, cavalier manner in darning socks, that is to say, taking the hole in wide circles, with needle and thread: and then, after that rapid circumnavigation, she pulled it all together and snapped off the thread at once, with her teeth. A first-class darn! Not even Princess Clotilde herself could have done better. A swelling, a musket ball under your heel which warmed your heart, for the whole festive day. Like so many orogenic seams towards the peak of a cone-shaped mountain: from those cones that pierce the clouds, which are the socks of the Lord.

She had brought to her student-husband, in addition to serene days and nights happy in the communion of souls and tongues, she had brought him . . . everything that a girl can bring in the practical and welcome line, for a student-husband: a great nonchalance in ironing pants, after having scorched six or seven pairs of Balducci's. That, we know, had been her discipline, her gradus ad Parnassum. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We learn by mistake. Trial and error.

The third, Virginia! Don Lorenzo lowered his eyes, looking at the ground, though he was a grown man; then he raised his eyes to heaven for half a second, as if to say: be still, my lips! He joined his pious hams in a brief swinging beneath his nose, before his beard: a to-and-fro in the plane of the azimuth, an Italic, decent gesture. "The less said the better!" he seemed to be pleading with Doctor Fumi. It had to be said. The two officers were waiting: Ingravallo, indeed, was on his feet, grim, nervously tapping one leg. The giant's ten huge fingers slumped in his lap, still tightly intertwined: