"Have you come to tell me that you will take the rooms
for six months more?" she asked as I approached her,
startling me by something coarse in her cupidity almost
as much as if she had not already given me a specimen of it.
Juliana's desire to make our acquaintance lucrative had been,
as I have sufficiently indicated, a false note in my image
of the woman who had inspired a great poet with immortal lines;
but I may say here definitely that I recognized after all
that it behooved me to make a large allowance for her.
It was I who had kindled the unholy flame; it was I who had
put into her head that she had the means of making money.
She appeared never to have thought of that; she had been
living wastefully for years, in a house five times too
big for her, on a footing that I could explain only by
the presumption that, excessive as it was, the space she
enjoyed cost her next to nothing and that small as were her
revenues they left her, for Venice, an appreciable margin.
I had descended on her one day and taught her to calculate,
and my almost extravagant comedy on the subject of the garden
had presented me irresistibly in the light of a victim.
Like all persons who achieve the miracle of changing their point
of view when they are old she had been intensely converted;
she had seized my hint with a desperate, tremulous clutch.

I invited myself to go and get one of the chairs that stood, at a distance,
against the wall (she had given herself no concern as to whether I
should sit or stand); and while I placed it near her I began, gaily,
"Oh, dear madam, what an imagination you have, what an intellectual sweep!
I am a poor devil of a man of letters who lives from day to day.