"'But,' they cried, 'the signorina shows her legs! She wears clothes like a man! It is immodest!' Imagine it—such a point of view here in Genazzano, which is like an earthly Paradise. I was confounded."
"'But is this Suburbia?' I asked. One expects Suburbia to be shocked—or even the provinces. Lily!" cried Aunt Clo in a tone of playful accusation. "I believe your father would be shocked. My legs—the legs that God gave me—would shock your father, if he saw them uncovered."
Once more the very fervour of Lily's inward acquiescence kept her silent.
"Oh, these people who are shocked!" said Aunt Clo with a musical groan. "But Genazzano is now used to my knickerbockers—who knows but that one day your father may be reconciled to the thought of uncovered legs? Or would he say—ha, ha!—would he say that they were immodest? an indecent spectacle?... I believe that's what he would say!"
Aunt Clo, speaking with mournful roguishness, seemed disposed, in a breezy, open-minded sort of way, to attribute the most prurient-minded views and expressions to the rest of humanity.
She told Lily that there was a girl in the village who was suspected of being about to have an illegitimate child. She was only fifteen.
"I have sent for her to come up here to-morrow. Naturally, her relations can get nothing out of her. They have frightened her, and made her believe that she has done something to be ashamed of."
She leant forward and scrutinized Lily's face by the indifferent light of the two oil-lamps in the room.
"Biglia Mia! But I've made you blush! It suits you, and is charming—but why—why?"
Lily was indeed blushing, deeply annoyed with herself for so doing, and yet irresistibly compelled to it by Aunt Clo's open mention of subjects that were never referred to at home, and had only been furtively whispered about by the least endurable of the girls at school.