The painting can be dated to around 1916. Structured along essential lines, the composition is cleverly designed to create a narrow spatiality that confines the solitary female figure in a sort of prison, real and metaphorical. The woman acts as a link between inside and outside. Silhouetted against the light the profile of the young woman, framed by the austere collected hairstyle, communicates the poignant melancholy of a daily housewife consumed in the prolonged waiting for a return that perhaps will not happen. The theme of a desired return of the men committed to the front is here freed from sentimentality and rhetorical excesses, supported instead by an objectifying simplification based on a rigorous design. The geometric schematization, exasperated by the robust latticework of the windows, is however mitigated by the chromatic system, which makes the most of the potential of a free and intuitive pointillism. With The Long Wait Guerello recovers the introspective tension that qualifies him as a talented portrait painter.