ht of day he
recognises a trait of hers which long has troubled him.

With _his_ first words we perceive that "nerves" are uppermost, that
the song and drink of the opening moment were bravado--that Sebald, in
short, is close on a breakdown. He turns upon her with a gibe against
her ever-shuttered windows. Though it is she who now has ordered the
unwelcome light to be admitted, he overlooks this in his enervation, and
says how, before ever they met, he had observed that her windows were
always blind till noon. The rest of the little world of Asolo would be
active in the day's employment; but her house "would ope no eye." "And
wisely," he adds bitterly--

"And wisely; you were plotting one thing there,
Nature, another outside. I looked up--
Rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars,
Silent as death, blind in a flood of light;
Oh, I remember!--and the peasants laughed
And said, 'The old man sleeps with the young wife.'
This house was his, this chair, this window--his."

The last line gives us the earliest hint of what has been done: "This
house _was_ his. . . ." But Ottima, whether from scorn of Sebald's
mental disarray, or from genuine callousness, answers this first moan of
anguish not at all. She gazes from the open lattice: "How clear the
morning is--she can see St. Mark's! Padua, blue Padua, is plain enough,
but where lies Vicenza? They shall find it, by following her finger that
points at Padua. . . ."

Sebald cannot emulate this detachment. Morning seems to him "a night
with a sun added"; neither dew nor freshness can he feel; nothing is
altered with this dawn--the plant he bruised in getting through the
lattice last night droops as it did then, and still there shows his
elbow's mark on the dusty sill.

She flashes out one instant. "Oh, shut the lattice, pray!"

No: he will lean forth--

". . . I cannot scent blood here,
Foul as the morn may be."

But his mood shifts quickly as her own--

". . . There, shut the world out!
How do you feel now, Ottima? There, curse
The world and all outside!"

and at last he faces her, literally and figuratively, with a wild appeal
to let the truth stand forth between them--

". . . Let us throw off
This mask: how do you bear yourself? Let's out
With all of it."

But no. Her instinct is never to speak of it, while his drives him to
"speak