I had a strange feeling, almost of disappointment. At heart, and almost without realizing it, I had hoped that Antonio would not be so quickly and so easily deflated. I had liked Antonio, I now saw, just because there was in him — or so it had seemed to me — something mysterious. The mystery having been dispersed, nothing remained but a poor fellow who went about annoying women, all women, including, perhaps, women like my wife who were utterly out of his reach. There was something that irritated me in this discovery of the secret mainspring of the barber's life. Previously, if I had allowed myself to be infected by Leda's resentment, I might have hated him. Now that I knew all about him, however, I seemed to feel nothing except pity mingled with contempt — a feeling which was humiliating not only for him but for me also, since I now saw myself suddenly degraded to a mortifying rivalry with a village Don Juan.
And yet, strange to say, there persisted in me the conviction that he had not really dared to raise his eyes towards my wife; and that, as I had at first supposed, he had been led against his will to make his admiration clear to her in his own way. The fact that he was a libertine did not seem to me to destroy this supposition; it appeared, rather, to explain the facility with which he had become excited at the first chance contact — a facility easily understandable in an adolescent whose senses are always ready to trip him up, but unlikely in an experienced man of forty whose ardours may be supposed to have cooled. Only a libertine, accustomed to cultivate certain instincts to the exclusion of all others, could have a sensibility so prompt and so irresistible.
I went so far as to admit that, all things considered, he had not been altogether displeased at finding himself in that embarrassing situation, and that he had at the same time both encouraged and fought against it. But there seemed to me to be no doubt at all that, in the first instance, it had been not deliberate but accidental.
It is possible that this inclination on my part to consider Antonio as being initially innocent (and I still consider him to be so), may have derived, partly at any rate, from my own selfishness, that is, from my fear of having to give him the sack and shave myself. But, even if this was true, I was certainly not aware of it. I thought over the whole affair with extreme objectivity; and often there is nothing like objectivity — that is, the forgetting of the links that connect objective and subjective motives — to encourage self-deception. To my conviction of Antonio's innocence, and to the feeling of contemptuous pity that I now had for him, must be added my wife's exaggerated reaction, which, if I had even imagined that I could be jealous, destroyed from the very first moment every reason for jealousy. In any case I am not of a jealous nature — at least, I do not think so. In me every passion is finally dissolved in the acid of reflection — a method as good as any other for subduing passion by destroying, at the same time, both its tyrannical power and the suffering it brings.
After my conversation with Angelo, I went as usual for a walk with my wife. It was then for the first time that I genuinely felt I was deceiving her. I felt I ought to tell her all I had learned about Antonio; but I didn't want to because I was aware that to do so would be, as it were, to rekindle in her, more strongly than ever, that first flame of anger that seemed now to be spent. Uncertain and filled with remorse, I at last said to her, at a moment when she appeared rather absent-minded: 'Perhaps you're still thinking about Antonio's lack of respect?… If you really want me to, I'll get rid of him.'
I think that, if she had asked it of me, this time I should have satisfied her. In effect, my selfishness had received a shock; and I only needed a little encouragement to give her what she wanted. I saw her give a start: '. . Thinking about the barber?. . no, no, not at all… To tell the truth, I had really forgotten all about him.'
'But if you want me to, I'll get rid of him,' I insisted, encouraged by this indifference of hers which seemed to be quite sincere, and with the feeling of making a proposal that could not fail to be rejected.
'But I don't want you to,' she said, 'it doesn't matter to me in the least.. . Really, as far as I'm concerned, it's just as if nothing had happened at all.'
'You see, I was thinking. .'
'It's a thing that concerns you, and only you,' she concluded with a thoughtful air, 'for the reason that it's only you, now, who can be vexed, or not vexed, by his presence here. . '