Poor maestra, she is yellow and bitter-skinned, near fifty, but her dark eyes are still corrosively inflammable. She was engaged to a lieutenant in the cavalry, who got drowned when she was twenty-one. Since then she has hung on the tree unripe, growing yellow and bitter-skinned, never developing.
'Amleto!' I say. 'Non lo conosco.'
A certain fear comes into her eyes. She is schoolmistress, and has a mortal dread of being wrong.
'Si,' she cries, wavering, appealing, 'una dramma inglese.'
'English!' I repeated.
'Yes, an English drama.'
'How do you write it?'
Anxiously, she gets a pencil from her reticule, and, with black-gloved scrupulousness, writes Amleto.
'Hamlet!' I exclaim wonderingly.
'Ecco, Amleto!' cries the maestra, her eyes aflame with thankful justification.