During this fight, they brought up many other trivial arguments. Finally, he suggested that they submit to an open confession before the Archbishop if necessary so God could decide if there had been soap in the soap dish. She lost her temper and yelled, "To hell with the Archbishop." The blasphemy became legendary in the city. She realized she had gone too far and anticipated her husbandÂ’s next move. She volunteered to move back to her fatherÂ’s house and live alone. She wasnÂ’t making an empty threat. She really wanted to move. Finally, Dr. Urbino capitulated, though he didnÂ’t say there had been soap in the soap dish. He just continued to live in the same house with her but slept in a different room. They lived in silence together. They sent each other messages across the table through the children and the children never even noticed they were arguing.

The study had no bathroom, so he had to use the one off their bedroom. One night as he lie down on the bed to wait for her get finished in the bathroom, he fell asleep. She lay down beside him, but he didnÂ’t get up. He just turned out the light. She shook him by the shoulder to remind him he was to go to the study, but he felt too comfortable in his great-grandparentsÂ’ featherbed, so he capitulated and said, "Let me stay here. There was soap."

Now after fifty years of marriage, they canÂ’t belief this was their most serious argument. Even now, they are careful when they bring it up for fear of re-opening the old wound. "He was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate." It was on their wedding night on board a ship headed for Europe. She was sick in bed with seasickness. Hearing the loudness of his urine made her extra fearful of "the devastation to come." She often remembered this over the years as the stream of his urine got weaker. She could never get used to his wetting the side of the toilet when he urinated. He tried to explain to her what happened to a man over the years. He finally began to wipe the rim of the toilet bowl with toilet paper after every urination. She tried to ignore it until it began to smell. She yelled out, "This sinks like a rabbit hutch." Finally, Dr. Urbino came up with the ultimate solution. He urinated sitting down.

On this Pentecost Sunday, when he had lifted the blanket to look at Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, he "experienced the revelation" of something he has not seen in all the years of his medical practice. After years of battling with death, he had looked death in the face and it had looked back at him. It wasnÂ’t a fear of death. Such fear had been with him for years. HeÂ’s glad that Divine Providence taught him the lesson with the use of his friend whom he had always considered a saint. "But when the letter revealed his true identity, his sinister past, his inconceivable powers of deception, he felt that something definitive and irrevocable had occurred in his life."

Fermina Daza refuses to let him get her caught up in his Mood even though he tries. He tries to tell her that he was nothing more than a fugitive from Cayenne, who had been condemned to life imprisonment for an atrocious crime. He had even eaten human flesh. He hands her the letter, but she puts it back on the dressing table. SheÂ’s used to his "unfathomable capacity for astonishment" which has grown as the years have gone by. His narrow mindedness does not fit his public image. She has imagined that her husband has held Jeremiah in such high esteem not for what he had been before he came, but for what he was afterwards. So she canÂ’t understand why he is so upset at JeremiahÂ’s true identity now. She canÂ’t understand why her husband thinks itÂ’s such an abomination that Jeremiah had a woman in secret. Besides, since the woman had helped him die, they must have loved each other.

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