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—at a distance! . . . I wish she would be a little more attentive to her appearance! She might brush her clothes once in a while, at least . . . and that old hat she wears! She looks more like a rag doll than like a woman! . . . Ah!—and the dust—the white dust has settled on her hair, too, here, around her forehead . . . and barely thirty-four at that! . . . (A pause.) I get so mad at her sometimes—you've no idea! . . . And I lose my temper—and I go up to her, and I almost scream in her face—"Idiot!—Idiot!" . . . and I give her a shaking! . . . Nothing!—She swallows it all, and just stands there looking at me, with eyes . . . with eyes . . . Well—I could choke the life out of her, then! . . . But no—she waits till I am some distance off—and then she takes up the trail again! . . . (At this point the woman's head again appears around the corner.) Look!—Look! . . . There she is again! . . . See her?—Did you see her?

THE CUSTOMER: Poor thing!

MAN WITH THE FLOWER: Poor thing! . . . Huh! . . . Do you know what that woman wants of me? She wants me to stay quiet—peaceful-like—at home where she can cuddle me and humour me with her tenderest and most affectionate attentions! . . . every room in perfect order . . . every piece of furniture in its place—and the varnish clean and polished. . . . Silence . . . deadly silence . . . broken only by the tick-tock, tick-tock of the grandfather's clock in our dining-room. . . . Huh! . . . That's her notion of life! . . . Well—I'll leave it to you. Isn't that about the limit of absurdity! . . . Absurdity?—Ferocity, I would say rather. . . . A kind of ghoulish cruelty! Do you suppose, sir, that the houses of Avezzano, or the houses of Messina, knowing that the earthquake was going to topple them over within a very few days, could have been persuaded to sit still there, under the moonlight—all in nice straight lines, radiating from the squares—eh?—the way the Town Planning Committee decided they ought to be? . . . No, sir!—Brick and stone though they were, they would have found legs, somehow, to run away! And the people who lived in them—do you think that if they had known what was going to happen to them, they would have