"They called it mine, I have forgotten why"
—and the noise the wasps made, eating the long papers that were strung there to keep off birds in fruit-time. . . . As she murmurs thus to herself, her mouth twitches, and the same girl who had laughed before, laughs now again: "Would I be such a fool!"—and tells her wish. The country-goose wants milk and apples, and another girl could think of nothing better than to wish "the sunset would finish"; but Zanze has a real desire, something worth talking about! It is that somebody she knows, somebody "greyer and older than her grandfather," would give her the same treat he gave last week—
"Feeding me on his knee with fig-peckers,
Lampreys and red Breganze wine;"
while she had stained her fingers red by
"Dipping them in the wine to write bad words with
On the bright table: how he laughed!"
And as she recalls that night, she sees a burnished beetle on the ground before her, sparkling along the dust as it makes its slow way to a tuft of maize, and puts out her foot and kills it. The country girl recalls a superstition connected with these bright beetles—that if one was killed, the sun, "his friend up there," would not shine for two days. They said it in her country "when she was young"; and one of the others scoffs at the phrase, but looking at her, exclaims that indeed she is no longer young: how thin her plump arms have got—does Cecco beat her still? But Cecco doesn't matter, nor the loss of her young freshness, so long as she keeps her "curious hair"—
"I wish they'd find a way to dye our hair
Your colour . . .
. . . The men say they are sick of black."
A girl who now speaks for the first and last time retorts upon this one that very likely "the men" are sick of her hair, and does she pretend that she has tasted lampreys and ortolans . . . but in the midst of this new speaker's railing, the girl with wine-stained fingers exclaims—
"Why there! Is not that Pippa
We are to talk to, under the window—quick— . . ."
The country girl thinks that if it were Pippa, she would be singing, as they had been told.