paradise, would
become infuriated with the poverty of his home and beat the whole
family.

"She was like all you women of the lower orders, Sagrario. Your beauty
only lasts an instant; in fact, it can only exist in the first flush
of youth. A woman of the poor cannot be beautiful unless she gets
out of her class. Daily labour makes her lose all her freshness and
strength, and maternity in the midst of poverty absorbs even the
marrow in her bones. When her daily work is ended and she returns
home, she has to sweep and wash, and shrivel herself to a mummy before
the smoky kitchen stove. I loved Lucy for that reason, because she was
consumed and drained by sweating, because she was the girl worker
in all her melancholy decadence, born beautiful and made hideous by
social injustice."

He recalled the unbending and deadly hatred with which that little
woman spoke so quietly of the supreme vengeance of the fallen, of the
revenge for long years of oppression. She showed herself more firmly
rooted and fiercer in her illusions than Gabriel, and he would praise
her daring as a propagandist, her perilous expeditions into the great
towns, running the gauntlet of watchful police, carrying on her arm
that old bonnet-box full of pamphlets that might have sent her to
prison. She was the "miss" animated by evangelical propaganda, who
travels over the globe distributing Bibles with a cold smile, fearless
alike of the mockery of civilisation, or the brutality of savages; but
what Lucy distributed were incitements to revolution; she did not seek
out the happy but the despairing, in the factories and infected
slums. The two endured hunger, finding themselves often separated by
persecution and prison, but they met again, continuing their romantic
career, till poverty and consumption ended her life.

Gabriel wept, remembering their last interview in an Italian hospital,
clean and sweet, but with the frozen atmosphere of charity. As he was
not her husband he could only visit her twice a week. He presented,
himself ragged and downcast, seeing her in an armchair daily paler
and weaker, her skin of a waxen transparency and her eyes immensely
enlarged. He knew a little about everything, and he could not conceal
from himself the gravity of her illness. She waited quietly for death.
"Bring me some roses," she said, smiling to Gabriel, as if in the last
moment of her life she wished to acknowledge the natural beauty of the
world made hideous and