The result is that the bachelor now and then looks up at the window, and the Signora Evelina now and then looks down at the garden.  The weather not being propitious to out-of-door conversation, Signora Evelina at length invites her neighbor to come and pay her a visit.  Her neighbor hesitates and she renews the invitation.  How can one resist such a charming woman?  And what does one visit signify?  Nothing at all.  The excellent average-adjuster has every reason to be pleased with his reception, the more so as Signora Evelina actually gives him leave to bring his pipe the next time he comes.  She adores the smell of a pipe.  Signora Evelina is an ideal woman, just the wife for a business man who had not positively made up his mind to remain single.  And as to that, muses the average-adjuster, have I ever positively made up my mind to remain single, and if I have, who is to prevent my changing it?

And so it comes to pass that when, after an absence of three months, Signor Odoardo returns home with Doretta, he receives notice of the approaching marriage of Signora Evelina Chiocci, widow Ramboldi, with Signor Archimede Fagiuolo.

“Fagiuolo!” shouts Doretta, “Fagiuolo!” [Footnote:  Fagiuolo:  a simpleton.]

The name seems to excite her unbounded hilarity; but I am under the impression that the real cause of her merriment is not so much Signora Evelina’s husband as Signora Evelina’s marriage.

COLLEGE FRIENDS

BY

EDMONDO DE AMICIS

The Translation by Edith Wharton.

[Footnote:  Although “College Friends” is rather a reverie than in any strict sense a story (something in the spirit of “The Reveries of a Bachelor,” if an analogy may be sought in another literature), it has been thought best to include it here as one of the best-known of De Amicis’ shorter writings.  Indeed it is the leading piece in his chief volume of “Novelle,” so that he has himself included it with his tales.]

I.

There are many who write down every evening what they have done during the day; some who keep a record of the plays they have seen, the books they have read, the cigars they have smoked—­but is there one man in a hundred, nay, in a thousand, who, at the end of the year, or even once in a lifetime, draws up a list of the people he has known?  I don’t mean his intimate friends, of course—­the few whom he sees, or with whom he corresponds; but the multitude of people met in the past, and perhaps never to be encountered again, of whom the recollection returns from time to time at longer and longer intervals as the years go by, until at length it wholly fades away.  Which of us has not forgotten a hundred once familiar names, lost all trace of a hundred once familiar lives?  And yet to my mind this forgetfulness implies such a loss in the way of experience, that if I could live my life over again I should devote at least half an hour a day to the tedious task of recording the names and histories of the people I met, however uninteresting they might appear.