"Then she married Del Ferice—before I was born. She is fabulously old. Mayer left her very rich, and without conditions. Del Ferice was an impossible person. My father nearly killed him in a duel once—also before I was born. I never knew what it was about. Del Ferice was a spy, in the old days when spies got a living in a Rome—"
"Ah! I see it all now!" exclaimed Maria Consuelo. "Del Ferice is white, and you are black. Of course you hate each other. You need not tell me any more."
"How you take that for granted!"
"Is it not perfectly clear? Do not talk to me of like and dislike when your dreadful parties have anything to do with either! Besides, if I had any sympathy with either side it would be for the whites. But the whole thing is absurd, complicated, mediaeval, feudal—anything you like except sensible. Your intolerance is—intolerable."
"True tolerance should tolerate even intolerance," observed Orsino smartly.
"That sounds like one of the puzzles of pronunciation like 'in un piatto poco cupo poco pepe pisto cape,'" laughed Maria Consuelo. "Tolerably tolerable tolerance tolerates tolerable tolerance intolerably—"
"You speak Italian?" asked Orsino, surprised by her glib enunciation of the difficult sentence she had quoted. "Why are we talking a foreign language?"
"I cannot really speak Italian. I have an Italian maid, who speaks French. But she taught me that puzzle."
"It is odd—your maid is a Piedmontese and you have a good accent."
"Have I? I am very glad. But tell me, is it not absurd that you should hate these people as you do—you cannot deny it—merely because they are whites?"