'Are you here too?' she asked in a sad, surprised tone.
'Yes, I came,' Carmela answered, with a resigned gesture.
'Have you seen my husband, Gaetano?' Annarella asked anxiously, letting the baby's head slide from her shoulder to her arm, so that it could sleep more comfortably.
Carmela raised her big eyes to her sister's face, but seeing her so dishevelled and ugly from privation and misery, so old already, so doomed to illness and death, asking the question so despairingly, she dared not tell her the truth. Yes, she had seen her brother-in-law Gaetano, the glove-cutter; she had first seen him trembling and anxious, thin, pale and downcast, but she felt too sorry for her sister, the delicate, sleeping baby, and the other two who were gazing around them, and she lied.
'I have not seen him at all.'
'He must have been here,' Annarella muttered in her rough drawl.
'I assure you he was not here, really.'
'You will not have seen him,' Annarella repeated, obstinate in her sad incredulity. 'How could he not come? He comes here every Saturday. He might not be at home with his little ones; he might not be at the glove factory, where he can earn bread; but he can't be anywhere else than here on Saturday to hear the numbers come out: here is his ruling passion and his death.'
'He plays a lot, doesn't he?' said Carmela, who had grown pale and had tears in her eyes.
'All that he can spare and more than he has got. We might live very well, without asking anything from anyone; but instead, with his bonafficiata, we are full of debts and mortifications; we only eat now and then, when I bring in something. These poor little things!'