When the wife goes back up to her hotel room after failing to locate the cat she was hoping to save from the rain, she walks by the desk of the hotel-keeper (who she here refers to as the "padrone," or "boss" in Italian). In capturing the wife’s emotional experience in this moment, Hemingway uses imagery and a paradox:
As the American girl passed the office, the padrone bowed from his desk. Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important. She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance.
The imagery that Hemingway uses here—describing how “[s]omething felt very small and tight inside the girl”—is vague and evocative at the same time. Because Hemingway’s writing style is primarily focused on capturing external events, a moment like this, in which he includes a peek into a character’s inner experience, is significant. The language Hemingway uses in this surprisingly vulnerable moment helps readers relate to the woman, since they, too, having likely experienced “something [feeling] small and tight” when they are embarrassed or have failed in a given venture (as the wife has failed to find the cat).
That Hemingway’s language is vague here (the use of the word “something” is rather unclear and ambiguous) says something important about the wife—namely, that she is not all that self-aware. In other words, it might not be the narrator who is being vague, but the wife herself who cannot identify exactly what she is feeling. This proves to be true throughout the story, as she unconsciously transfers her desire for closeness with her husband onto a cat.
In addition to imagery, there is also a paradox in this passage: “The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important.” The wife’s confusion about how to feel could come from a few different sources. First, her experience with the hotel-keeper could be coming from her experience with the cat—she both pities the cat (seeing it as small and pathetic stuck out in the rain) and also sees it as very important (as it could have helped her feel less alone). Alternatively, she may just be confused about how to relate to the hotel-keeper as, just moments before, she walked by him feeling self-important and now, after failing to find the cat, she feels small and like a failure.
