‘No. I am not a barbarian like the Conte di Montalto. But I will cut off your little head with a handsaw.’
He was a carpenter. There were Romans of all sorts in the Villa, the smart and the vulgar, the rich and the poor, and the rich man who felt poor because he had lost a few thousands at cards, and the poor man who felt rich because he had won twenty francs at the public lottery. The high and mighty were there, buzzing about royalties on foot, and there were the lowly and meek, eating cheap cakes under the stone pines and looking on from a distance. There were also some of the low who were not meek at all, but excessively cheeky because they had been told that all men are equal, and had paid their money at the gate in order to prove the fact by jostling their betters and staring insolently at modest girls whose fathers chanced to be gentlemen. These youngsters could be easily distinguished by their small pot hats stuck on one side, their red ties, and their unhealthy faces.
At some distance from Maria Montalto’s booth there was another, where a number of Roman ladies chanced to have met just then and were discussing their friends. Most of them had a genuinely good word for Maria.
‘I have not seen her in colours since her boy was born,’ said the elderly Princess Campodonico. ‘She is positively adorable!’
‘What is her story, mother?’ asked the Princess’s daughter, a slim and rather prim damsel of seventeen.
‘Her story, my dear?’ inquired the lady with a sort of stony stare. ‘What in the world can you mean?’ She turned to a friend as stout, as high-born, and as cool as herself. ‘I hear you have ordered a faster motor car,’ she said.
The slim girl was used to her mother’s danger signals, and she turned where she stood and looked wistfully and curiously at Maria di Montalto, who was some twenty yards away.
‘As if I were not old enough to hear anything!’ the young lady was saying to herself.
Then she was aware that the two elder women were talking in an undertone, and not at all about motor cars.