After a while the unhappiness of the past seemed to have faded from her mind.  She spoke little of Paris, less of the dull pension, and never of Pasquale.  She bore towards him an animal’s silent animosity against a human being who has done it an unforgettable injury.  On the other hand, as I have since discovered, she was slowly developing, and had begun to realise that in giving herself light-heartedly to a man whom she did not love, she had committed a crime against her sex, for which she had paid a heavy penalty:  a sentiment, however, which did not mitigate her resentment against him.  Often I saw her sitting with knitted brows, her needlework idle on her lap, evidently unravelling some complicated problem; presently she would either shake her head sadly as if the intellectual process were too hard for her and resume her needle, or if she happened to catch my glance, she would start, smile reassuringly at me, and apply herself with exaggerated zeal to her work.  These fits of abstraction were not those of a woman speculating on mysteries of the near future.  Such Carlotta also indulged in, and they were easy to recognise, by the dreaminess of her eyes and the faint smile flickering about her lips.  The moods of knitted brows were periods of soul-travail, and I wondered what they would bring forth.

One afternoon I came home and found her weeping over a book.  When I bent down to see what she was reading—­she had acquired a taste for novels during the dull pension time in Paris—­she caught my head with both hands.

“Oh, Seer Marcous, do you think they ought to make me wear a great ’A’?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Like Hester Prynne—­see.”

She showed me Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter.”

“What made you take this out of the shelves?”

“The title,” she replied, simply.  “I am so fond of red things; but I should not like that great red ’A’.”

“Those were days,” said I, “when people thought they could only be good by being very cruel.”

“They would have been more cruel if Hester had not loved the minister,” said Carlotta, looking at me wistfully.

“My dear little girl,” said I, seeing whither her thoughts were tending, “do not bother your brain with psychological problems.”

“What are—?” began Carlotta.

I pinched the question, as it were, out of her cheek and smiled and took away the book.

“They are a dreadful disease my little girl has been afflicted with for some time.  When you sit and wrinkle your forehead like this,” and I scowled forbiddingly, whereat Carlotta laughed, “you are suffering from acute psychological problem.”

“Then I am thinking,” said Carlotta, reflectively.

“Don’t think too much, dear, just now,” said I.  “It is best for you to be happy and calm and contented.  Otherwise I’ll have to tell the doctor, and he’ll give you the blackest and nastiest physic you have ever tasted.”