She pointed smilingly to the old sofa, and Signor Giuseppe took a seat upon it, and looked around him. ‘This is surely not your workroom,’ he said, without answering her polite speeches, as his eyes wandered from one object to another. ‘No. This is my sitting-room, business-room, reception-room, whatever you like to call it. Above all, it is the sanctuary to which I beat a retreat whenever I feel discouraged with my own miserable attempts inside there’ (she pointed slightingly in the direction of the workroom), ‘so discouraged that I can no longer remain amongst them and the ghosts of better things. A very useful room, this, I assure you.’ ‘Ah, you feel like that,’ said Giuseppe, looking at her, ‘but not often, I imagine.’ ‘Oftener than not, signore.’ ‘I should not have thought it.’ ‘Do I appear so very self-complacent?’ ‘Perhaps not. I may have judged you wrongly. It is probably merely your position in general, which is a secure and comfortable one, which gives you that appearance of unruffled calm.’ ‘But I do not always feel unruffled calm, by any means,’ she told him. ‘Not even when you encounter me engaged in the duties of a household servant, or a collector of rents and rates, or a supplementary cook--in short, in all the most ludicrous and undignified false positions in which a man can be placed--and smile serenely with cold amusement upon the spectacle,’ he said, plunging into the very heart of the uncomfortable topic. Minna drew a deep breath. ‘I do not smile with cold amusement at you or at anything which I see causes you to suffer,’ she said in a clear, almost loud voice, as she looked him full in the face, thinking to herself, ‘Thank heaven! now we are going to have it out, in one way or another. Something must come of this.’ ‘Signora, you could scarcely sit here and admit that what I say is true. Politeness demands of you that you should deny my assertion. Yet I have seen you smiling at me, or rather at my embarrassment, repeatedly--at the ridiculous dilemmas in which Fate has so often decreed that you should catch me.’ ‘I wish I could make you understand how far from me it is to wish to laugh at what gives pain to another,’ she said. ‘I know I have smiled. I can’t help that. Heaven has given me a keen sense of the ridiculous. I cannot alter my nature.’ ‘Just so; you admit all that I say; you find me ridiculous.’ ‘No, I do not. Sometimes I am reminded of things which are ridiculous, or which seem ridiculous to me. I am reminded of them by the situations in which I see you,’ she went on boldly, in spite of the anger she saw rising in his face. ‘You don’t believe me. I will give you an example; then, perhaps, you will see what I mean. You have perhaps not forgotten that, last night, at dinner----’ ‘Ah!’ exclaimed he, wincing visibly, as if someone had thrust a sharp pin into him. ‘Forgotten?’ he continued in a deep, tragic voice; ‘no, I have not forgotten!’