‘Oh, beautiful and adorned with all the virtues, I have no doubt, but still a woman, my dear lady, a woman! And after a little, good God! with children and misery, think what she’d have been! And the world, my dear woman, do you know what the world would have become for him? A house! This house!’ And the doctor goes out, muttering: ‘_No_ books! _No_ women! _No_ house! Nothing!’ Now, despite its vividness, this is thin and superficial and, if taken as the moral, at least as inadequate as any other moral would have been to such a tragedy. It may perhaps be taken as an adequate moral if the point of the story is not the young man’s tragedy, but the character of the doctor; but I fear that, instead, we have here Pirandello himself in a characteristic mood of hatred and disgust for grovelling life. In the last story in the book, _La distruzione dell’uomo_, you get the mood again, and the moralizing, unrelieved by a really possible, poignant tragedy. Here a young student murders a commonplace woman of forty-seven because she is about to have a child. She has been pregnant year after year before this, but each time has had a miscarriage. This time it is clear that the child will be born. And the student, in disgust for her, her husband, the squalid tenement-house they, and he, live in, and the squalid world beyond, murders the woman with her unborn child, feeling fiercely that he is murdering humanity itself, destroying Man. A pity! Not only because there are a dozen moods that might be felt in considering that middle-aged couple, that distressing eighth-rate apartment-house, with its dirty dishevelled walls and ragged display of washing and the filthy children swarming in its courtyard, instead of the one, not very perceptive mood of disgust to which we are held; but also because in the expression of even this one mood Pirandello has here, as often elsewhere, overdone himself, so that positively one finishes the story in such a reaction of cheerfulness as almost to agree with dear Pippa’s favourite remark. There you had it all--a masterly picture of the house, of the quarter (that quarter of Rome has certainly changed for the better of late years), and of the heavy elderly couple, she with vast distorted stomach, he with an only less vast one, making laboriously the daily walk prescribed for her by the doctor, out past the church of Sant’ Agnese and back again, out and back again. Why not let it go at that and leave the reader to feel what he pleases? Most readers, I think, would feel pathos in the solemn anxiety of those two to add one more inhabitant to that house and quarter--and world, if you like. But if disgust was all one could feel, that, too, he would surely feel more keenly if left to feel it undirected.