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anybody … At the same time she’ll be close by, one never knows, one must be ready for any eventuality.… A success, was it? All the better—their character improves as they convalesce, and if madam still elects to be angry,we’ll explain, we’ll explain, we wanted to do what was best, maybe we got a little flustered, we admit, but all with the best …
    In a joyful rush, he changed the sheets on his bed (in her former bedroom); tidied up summarily; bathed; called off a business meeting; canceled the char; had a quick snack in his “bachelor” restaurant; bought a supply of dates, ham, rye bread, whipped cream, muscat grapes—had he forgotten anything?—and, when he got home, disintegrated into multiple packages and kept visualizing how she would pass here and sit down there, springily bracing herself behind her back with her slender bare arms, all curly and dark—and at that moment there was a call from the hospital asking him to look in after all; on the way to the station he reluctantly stopped by and learned that the person was no more.
    He was seized first of all by a sense of enraged disappointment: it meant that his plan had fallen through, that this night with all its warm, cosy closeness had been snatched from him, and that, when she arrived in response to a telegram, it would naturally be in the company of that hag and that hag’s husband, and the two of them would settle in for a good week. But the very nature of this first reaction, the momentum of this shortsighted rush of emotion, created a vacuum, since an immediate transition from vexation at her death (which happened to have temporarily interfered) to gratitude (for the basiccourse destiny had taken) was impossible. Meanwhile, that vacuum was filling with preliminary, grayly human content. Sitting on a bench in the hospital garden, gradually calming down, preparing for the various steps of the funeral procedure, he mentally reviewed with appropriate sadness what he had just seen with his own eyes: the polished forehead, the translucent nostrils with the pearly wart on one side, the ebony cross, all of death’s jewelry work. He parenthetically gave surgery a contemptuous dismissal and started thinking what a superb period she had had under his tutelage, how he had incidentally provided her with some real happiness to brighten the last days of her vegetative existence, and thence it was already a natural transition to crediting clever Fate with splendid behavior, and to the first delicious throb in his bloodstream:the lone wolf was getting ready to don Granny’s nightcap.
    He was expecting them next day at lunchtime. The doorbell rang on schedule, but the late person’s friend stood on the doorstep alone (extending her bony hands and taking unfair advantage of a severe cold for the exigencies of obvious condolence): neither her husband nor “the little orphan” could come because both were laid up with the flu. His disappointment was alleviated by the thought that it was best this way—why spoil things? The girl’s presence amid this combination of funereal encumbrances would have been just as agonizing as hadbeen her arrival for the wedding, and it would be much more sensible to spend the coming days getting the formalities over with and thoroughly preparing a radical leap into complete safety. The only part that irritated him was the way the woman said “both”—the bond of illness (as if the two patients were sharing a common sickbed), the bond of contagion (maybe that vulgarian, following her up a steep staircase, liked to paw her bared thighs).
    Feigning total shock—which was simplest of all, as murderers know too—he sat like a benumbed widower, his larger-than-life hands lowered, scarcely moving his lips in reply to her advice that he relieve the constipation of grief with tears, and watched with a turbid gaze as she blew her nose (all three were united by the cold—that was better). When, absently but greedily attacking the