I, too, a solitary observer, enjoyed all the bright sunshine and the happiness of the people, but forgot that I had only looked to the right and straight before me; I turned calmly to the left, sure of finding there another scene of joy and brightness. On the contrary, the picture was very different. At a table just as clean and white as the others, played on capriciously by light and shade, two persons were sitting, a man and a woman. He was about thirty, she forty-five. He was handsome, robust, with manly energy; she lame, fat, and hunch-backed. There ought to have been a neck, but there was none to be seen, for the heavy head appeared to have been put on the chest awry; and all the cruel artifices resorted to for hiding the hump behind seemed made on purpose to produce another in front. Even her features were ugly, and the ill-made hands were laden with rings. Large earrings were in her ears, and a colossal locket surrounded by diamonds, inclosing the man’s portrait, was hanging in front. Husband and wife, no doubt. She was eating, but could not have known the flavour of the food, for the mouthful went round and round between her teeth, whilst another piece on the fork was waiting in vain for its turn to enter the mouth. That poor deformed being did not cry, that is, no tears fell on her cheeks, but she blew her nose every now and then, and the eyes were moist and sad. She placed the fork automatically from time to time on the plate, with the mouthful still on it, and gazed at the man lovingly, tenderly, waiting, imploring for a look. But the look never came. With one hand he hastily conveyed the food to his mouth, and with the other held a newspaper, which he was reading with pretended interest, so as not to have the silence interrupted. He did not shed tears nor blow his nose, but he frowned, and he was also suffering one of those intense and hidden agonies to which one does not confess, but which furrow the soul like harrows of steel. I did not remove my eyes again from that dumb and agonizing scene. After a long interval she said to him, timidly, hesitatingly, almost as if committing a crime: “Will you take anything else?” He started as if the voice had struck him like a blow in the face; he turned to her and twisted his mouth like one seized with a sudden and irresistible disgust. “No, I want nothing more.”