“I think that it is possible to clothe what one has to say in so roundabout a form that——”
“That the censorship won't understand it? And then you'll expect every poor artisan and labourer to find out the meaning by the light of the ignorance and stupidity that are in him! That doesn't sound very practicable.”
“Martini, what do you think?” asked the professor, turning to a broad-shouldered man with a great brown beard, who was sitting beside him.
“I think that I will reserve my opinion till I have more facts to go upon. It's a question of trying experiments and seeing what comes of them.”
“And you, Sacconi?”
“I should like to hear what Signora Bolla has to say. Her suggestions are always valuable.”
Everyone turned to the only woman in the room, who had been sitting on the sofa, resting her chin on one hand and listening in silence to the discussion. She had deep, serious black eyes, but as she raised them now there was an unmistakable gleam of amusement in them.
“I am afraid,” she said; “that I disagree with everybody.”
“You always do, and the worst of it is that you are always right,” Riccardo put in.
“I think it is quite true that we must fight the Jesuits somehow; and if we can't do it with one weapon we must with another. But mere defiance is a feeble weapon and evasion a cumbersome one. As for petitioning, that is a child's toy.”