"That is better than being educated at home by a priest." Gianluca smiled again. "Besides, you are different. That is why I say that if I have an opinion, you have made it for me. You are doing all those things which I could not have believed in a book, and they are turning out well. If society could see you here, it would not find it necessary to invent a duenna to chaperon you. But it is not everybody who could do what you have done, and succeed. I do not wonder that my mother is astonished, and my father, too. But at the same time, since you can do such things, it seems to me that you would have made a great mistake in doing anything else—as great a mistake as Julius Caesar would have made if he had chosen to remain a fashionable lawyer instead of mixing in politics, or Achilles, if he had taken a necklace or a bracelet and left the sword in Ulysses' basket. You would have found your mythical duenna a nuisance in real life."
Veronica laughed.
"At the end of the first week I should have locked her up in the dungeon tower, to get rid of her," she said.
"I have no doubt that you would, and your people would have thought it the most natural thing in the world. You could do anything you pleased in this place, I fancy. They would not think it strange if you tried and condemned a cheating steward and had him executed in that gloomy courtyard we passed through when we came in yesterday."
"The law might find fault with my vivacity," said Veronica. "But my people would say that I had done right if the man had really cheated them. It is quite true, I think. I could do almost anything here. I had a man locked up in the municipal prison the other day for forty-eight hours, because he was tipsy and swore at Don Teodoro in the street. Of course, it is nominally the syndic who does that sort of thing; but he belongs to me, like everything else here, and I do as I please, just as my grandfather did, when he really had power of life and death in Muro, including the privilege of torture. The first article mentioned in the old inventory was forty palms of stout rope for giving the cord, as they called it. They did it under the main gate,—that is why it came first,—and they used to pull them up to the vault and then drop them with a jerk to within two feet of the ground. The ring is still there, just inside the gate."
"My mother's uncle—the old Marchese di Rionero—once hanged a ruffian for mutilating one of his horses out of spite. And they say that Italy has not progressed! There is no hanging, not even for murder, nowadays."
"Yes," answered Veronica, thoughtfully, "we have progressed, in a way. That is our trouble—we have progressed too fast and improved too little, I think."
"That sounds paradoxical."
"Oh no! It is common sense, as I mean it. Progress costs money, improvement brings it. Progress means wearing clothes like other people, having splendid cities like other nations, keeping up armies and navies like other great powers. Improvement means helping poor people to earn more wages and to live better—giving them a possibility of happiness, instead of taking the little they have in order to give ourselves the appearance of greatness. That is why I say that in Italy we have too much progress and too little improvement."
"Yes—how well you put it!" Gianluca looked at her with quick admiration.