'Look,' I said, 'it's just as I thought… He couldn't help touching you. If anything, then, it was you who ought to have drawn away a little to the other side.'

'That's just what I did; but then he went round to the other side.'

'Perhaps he had to do that in order to do your hair on that side.'

'But, Silvio — is it possible you can be so blind, so stupid? One would say you were doing it on purpose… I tell you, there was a deliberate intention in those contacts.'

A question was on my lips, but I hesitated to ask it. Finally I said: 'There's contact and contact. . Did it seem to you that while he was touching you he was — how shall I say? — excited?'

She was sitting huddled in the armchair, a finger between her teeth, with an expression of strange perplexity on her still angry face. 'Certainly,' she answered, shrugging her shoulders.

I was afraid I had not understood properly, or had not made myself clear. 'In fact,' I insisted, 'it was obvious that he was excited?'

'Well, yes.'

I now realized that I was perhaps even more astonished by my wife's behaviour than by Antonio's. She was no longer a girl, but a woman of considerable experience; besides, I was not ignorant that, with regard to things of this kind, she had always had a sort of gay cynicism. All that I knew of her led me to think that she would not have made any fuss over this incident; or, at most, that she would have told me about it in a detached, ironical way. Instead of which, all this rage and hatred! I said, perplexed: 'But look, all this still doesn't mean anything… It might happen to anybody to get excited by certain contacts without wanting to, in fact not wanting to at all.. . It's happened to me sometimes in a crowd or in a tram, that I found myself wedged against some woman and got excited without meaning to.. . The spirit is willing,' I added jokingly, intending to calm her down, 'but the flesh is weak.. . Why, good heavens. .'

She said nothing. She appeared to be thinking deeply, biting the tip of her finger and looking towards the window. I thought she had calmed down and I went on, still in a joking manner: 'Even saints have their temptations, so what about barbers!. . Poor Antonio, when he least expected it, made the unwilling discovery that you're a very beautiful and very desirable woman. Being close to you, he wasn't able to control himself. . probably it was just as disagreeable for him as for you — and that's all there is to it.'