Day 18

Zeno has perhaps unusual ideas about what’s objective and what’s subjective—or perhaps not so unusual? He thinks that beauty, for example, which he deems “a woman’s health” (!), is for him (or another man) to decide. Hence he is amazed that “Ada believed she was still beautiful!”

When Guido, having gambled on the stock market and lost, laments, “Have you ever seen a man with worse luck than me?” Zeno is indignant, and offended. “Natural law does not entitle us to happiness,” Zeno believes, “but rather it prescribes wretchedness and sorrow.” Guido, in complaining, fails to behave “like a gentleman” again—social convention is, for Zeno, determinative and paramount.

The family dance around Guido’s debt is rather like a West End farce: Zeno offers to use his inheritance to bail out his brother-in-law; this upsets his wife Augusta, who thinks he’s done so out of love for her sister Ada; while it upsets Ada, who worries about bankrupting her favorite sister, Augusta… and so it goes, money and love ever entangled…