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of them. But I turned a deaf ear without looking at her. At a certain point she leaves me, accosts a pair of newly-weds, and hangs onto them like a gadfly.
    Will they give her a small coin? I ask myself.
    Oh, you don't know, young lady! The first time newly-weds go walking arm in arm along the street, they think everybody in the whole world is staring at them. They experience the embarrassment of their new situation, which all those eyes perceive and imagine they feel, and they have neither the knowledge nor the ability to stop and give alms to a poor soul.
    A little later, in fact, I hear someone running after me and shouting: "Sir, sir."
    And there she is again, with the same monotonous whimper, just as before. I can't take it any longer. Exasperated, I shout to her: "No!"
    Worse than before. It was as if that "no" had uncorked a couple of other sentences that she had been bottling up and saving for just such an eventuality. I huff, I huff again, and then, finally, a uff! I raise my cane. Like this. She backs off to one side, instinctively raising her arm to protect her head, and from under her elbow groans: "Even two cents!"
    My God, what strange eyes lit up in that emaciated, yellowish face topped with reddish, matted hair. All the vices of the street squirmed in those eyes — appalling eyes in a girl so young. (I'm not adding an exclamation point to that sentence, because, now that I'm sane, nothing should astonish me anymore.)
    Even before seeing those eyes of hers, I regretted my threatening gesture.
    "How old are you?"
    The girl looks at me askance, without lowering her arm, and does not reply.
    "Why don't you work?"
    "I wish I could! I can't find a job."
    "You're not looking for one," I tell her, setting out again, "because you've taken a liking to this fine sort of occupation."
    It goes without saying, the girl followed me again with her painful chant: that she was hungry, that I should give her something for the love of God.
    Could I have taken off my jacket and said to her: "Take this"? I wonder. In former times I would have. But, of course, in former times I would have had a small coin in my pocket.
    Suddenly an idea came to me, for which I feel I must excuse myself in the presence of sane people. To go out and work is no doubt good advice, but advice that is all too easily given. It occurred to me that Marta was looking for a servant girl.
    Mind you, I consider this sudden idea a stroke of madness, not so much for the anxious joy it aroused in me, and which I immediately recognized quite well, since on other occasions, when I was crazy, I had experienced exactly the same feeling: a sort of dazzling elation that lasts a second, a flash, in which the world seems to throb and tremble entirely within us, but for the reflections — those of a poor sane man — with which I immediately tried to sustain the elation. I thought: As long as we give this girl something to eat, a place to sleep and some hand-me-down clothes, she'll serve us without expecting anything else. It will also be a saving for Marta. That's exactly how I reasoned.
    "Listen," I said to the girl, "I won't give you any money, but do you really want to work?"
    She stopped to look at me for a while with those peevish eyes of hers under hatefully knit brows. Then she nodded several times.
    "Okay? Good, then come with me. I'll give you some work to do in my house."
    The girl stopped again, perplexed.
    "And what about Mama?"
    "You'll go tell her about it later. Come along now."
    It seemed to me that I was walking down another avenue and... I'm ashamed to say, that the houses and trees were charged with the same excitement that I felt. And the excitement grew; it grew by degrees as I approached my house.
    What would my wife say?
    I couldn't have presented the proposition to her more awkwardly (I was stuttering). And certainly, most certainly, my clumsy manner must have not only contributed to making her reject the idea, as was only right, but also to