So goes the world. Every one must look out for himself, and so said Cousin Venera to Padron ’Ntoni’s ’Ntoni—“Every one must see to his own beard first, and then to the others. Your grandfather gives you nothing; what claim has he on you? If you marry, that means that you must set up house for yourself, and what you earn must be for your own house and your own family. ‘Many hands are a blessing, but not all in one dish.’”
“That would be a fine thing to do, to be sure,” answered ’Ntoni. “Now that my relations are on the street, am I to throw them over? How is my grandfather to manage the Provvidenza and to feed them all without me?”
“Then get out of it the best way you can!” exclaimed La Zuppidda, turning away from him to hunt over the drawers, or in the kitchen, upsetting everything here and there, making believe to be ever so busy, not to have to look him in the face. “I didn’t steal my daughter. You can go on by yourselves, because you are young and strong and can work, and have your trade at your finger-ends—all the more now that there are so few young men, with this devil of a conscription sweeping off all the village every year; but if I’m to give you the dowry to spend it on your own people, that’s another affair. I mean to give my daughter to one husband, not to five or six, and I don’t mean she shall have two families on her shoulders.”
Barbara, in the other room, feigned not to hear, and went on plying her shuttle briskly all the time. But if ’Ntoni appeared at the door, she cast down her eyes and wouldn’t look at him. The poor fellow turned yellow and green and all sorts of colors, for she had caught him, like a limed sparrow, with those great black eyes of hers, and then she said to him after her mother was gone, “I’m sure you don’t love me as much as you do your own people!” and began to cry, with her apron over her head.
“I swear,” exclaimed ’Ntoni, “I wish I could go back to soldiering again!” and tore his hair and thumped himself in the head, but couldn’t come to any decision one way or the other, like the pumpkin-head that he was.
“Then,” cried the Zuppidda, “come, come! each to his own home!” And her husband went on repeating:
“Didn’t I tell you I didn’t choose to have a fuss?”
“You be off to your work!” replied she. “You know nothing about it.”
’Ntoni, every time he went to the Zuppiddi, found them in an ill-humor, and Cousin Venera went on throwing in his face that time that his people had asked Goosefoot’s wife to dress Mena’s hair—and a fine hair-dressing they’d made of it!—licking Cousin Tino’s boots because of that twopenny business of the house, and he’d taken the house all the same.
“Then, Cousin Venera, if you speak in this way, I suppose you mean, ‘I don’t want you in my house any longer.’”