You tell him how poor Daddi looked at everyone."

His friends, then, told Nicolino Respi how Daddi, upon returning from his vacation, appeared dazed and absentminded to all of them. As soon as anyone called him, an empty smile would form on his lips and his eyes would turn dull and lifeless. Then that befuddled look disappeared, having transformed itself into an acute, strange sort of staring. He first of all stared from a distance, sideways. Then, gradually, he began to do his examining from up close, as if attracted by certain signs he thought he discovered in one or more of his closest friends, especially in those who most assiduously came visiting at his house. Those signs were of course quite natural, because in fact everyone was bewildered by the abrupt and unusual transformation which was so completely in contrast with the carefree serenity of his character. Then, in those last days, he became downright unbearable. He would suddenly stop in front of first one, then another of his friends, place his hands on the man's shoulders, and look intently and more and more deeply into his eyes.

"Gad! How frightening!" exclaimed Traldi at this point, pulling himself up again to sit straighter.

"But why?" asked Respi, nervously.

"Would you believe it? He wants to know why!" uttered Traldi, again raising his voice. "Aha, you mean why it was so frightening? My dear friend, I would have liked to have seen you at grips with that look of his! You change your shirt every day, I suppose. You're certain your feet are clean and your socks don't have holes in them. But are you equally certain that you don't have any filth inside, that is, in your conscience?"

"Oh, my God, I should say..."

"Come on, now, you can't be sincere!"

"And you are?"

"Yes, I am. I'm quite sure of it! And believe me, it happens to all of us, more or less. We discover, in some lucid interval, that we're swine! For some time now, almost every night, when I put out the candle before falling asleep..."

"You're growing old, my dear fellow! You're growing old!" his friends shouted at him in chorus.

"It might be because I'm growing old," admitted Traldi. "So much the worse! It's no fun foreseeing that in the end I'll form just such an opinion of myself—that of being an old swine. Anyway, wait a moment. Now that I've told you this, shall we try a little experiment? Quiet, all the rest of you!"

And Carlo Traldi rose laboriously to his feet. He then placed his hands on Nicolino Respi's shoulders and shouted at him:

"Look me straight in the eyes. No, don't laugh, my dear fellow! Look me straight in the eyes... Wait! Wait, the rest of you, too. Quiet..."

They all became silent as they gathered around. They were held in suspense, engrossed in this strange experiment.

Traldi, his huge, oval, bloodshot eyes popping out of their sockets, stared most intently into Nicolino Respi's eyes. It seemed that with the evil shine of that stare, which became increasingly sharper and more intense, he was carefully searching his friend's conscience and discovering in its most intimate hiding places the most shameful and dreadful things. Gradually Nicolino Respi's eyes started to lose their sharpness, to cloud over, to shift, while below them, his lips with their usual little smile seemed nonetheless to say: "Come on, now, I'm just going along with it as a joke." In the meantime, amid the silence of his friends, Traldi, without ceasing to stare, without relaxing the intensity of his gaze one bit, said victoriously and in a strange tone of voice:

"There... see?... see?"

"Get out of here!" burst out Respi, unable to stand it any longer, and shaking himself all over.

"You get out of here, now that we've understood one another!" shouted Traldi. "You're a worse swine than I am!"

And he burst out laughing. The others laughed too, feeling unexpected relief. And Traldi continued:

"Now that was just a joke. Only as a joke can one of us set himself to looking at another like that. Because both you and I have that little machine known as civilization within us, and it's still in good working order, so we let the dregs of all our actions, of all our thought s, and of all our feelings, settle ever so quietly and secretly to the bottom of our consciences.