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exhausting Sunday spent in trailing round the streets and the public gardens, lets herself be violated, more from weariness than from love, by some casual companion of hers, in a field on the outskirts of a city.

p 277 ... It was a photograph taken actually on the day before the entry into Shanghai of the Communist troops in 1949. It showed a row of Chinese who, packed close together and with faces strained with the effort, clasping to their chests documents or savings books, were struggling to reach the doors of a bank as quickly as possible with the object of withdrawing their money and fleeing before the Mao's army occupied the city. ...

'They're the bourgeois Chinese withdrawing their savings from the bank before Mao arrives. So what?' He shook

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his head and replied with unexpected ingenuousness: 'Why that's what I would like to see here in Rome'. 'What do you mean?' 'I mean a row of bourgeois struggling to withdraw their money from the bank, and among them Viola with her savings book clasped to her chest. And meanwhile the troops of the revolution occupying the city.' 'Was it to tell me this that you brought the Cartier-Bresson Album?' 'Yes, so that you'll be convinced that I think like you.' 'But what do you, in fact, think?'

He took time and then answered: 'That photograph has made me understand so many things. The day when the troops entered Shanghai was so to speak, the boundary line between two epochs. Before that day there was capitalism, the bourgeois, banks people like Viola;