"If only I had been born a man!" she said. "Oh, I should have liked it! If I pushed it now—"
"If you pushed it," said Mitsos, "you would push with all your weight. So when it fell out, you would fall with it, eight feet to the beach below; also your petticoats would fly."
The Capsina struggled with inward laughter for a moment.
"It is likely so," she said. "Therefore show me how to push it."
The fragment of wall which Mitsos was to push outward was a rotten projecting angle once joining a cross-wall, but now sticking out helplessly, in the decay of the others, into space. It was some six feet high, and the top of it on a level with Mitsos's nose. He looked at it scornfully a moment, and then at the Capsina.
"It shall be as you will," he said, "but I shall dirty my beautiful clean shirt, even tear it perhaps on the shoulder, and who shall mend it again for me?"
"Push; oh, push!" said the Capsina. "Be a little man."
Mitsos braced his shoulder to it, wedged his right foot for purchase against an uneven stone in the floor, and his left foot close to the wall, so that he could recover himself when it should fall outward. Then with a fine confidence, "You shall see," he said, and butted against it as a bull butts, sparring only half in earnest with a tree. Wall and tree remain immovable.
"That is very fine," said the Capsina. "It nearly shook."
Mitsos put a little more weight into it, and felt the muscles tighten and knot in his leg, and the Capsina sighed elaborately.