"Take a bag of olives," she said to her daughter, "and come with me."
Nanni was shoveling the olives into the hopper and shouting "Ohi" to the mule to keep it going.
"Do you want my daughter Maricchia?" demanded gnà Pina.
"What dowry will you give with your daughter Maricchia?" replied Nanni.
"She has her father's things, and besides I will give her my house; it will be enough for me if you'll let me have a corner in the kitchen to spread out a mattress in."
"If that is so, we can talk about it at Christmas," said Nanni. Nanni was all grease and dirt from the olives put to fermenting, and Maricchia would not have him on any account; but her mother grabbed her by the hair as they stood in front of the hearth and hissed through her set teeth,—
"If you don't take him, I'll kill you."
La Lupa looked ill, and the people remarked: "When the devil was old the devil a monk would be." She no longer went wandering about; she stood no more at her doorway looking out with those eyes as of one possessed.
Her son-in-law, when she fixed those eyes on his face, always began to laugh, and would pull out his cloth talisman, with its effigy of the Madonna, to cross himself with.
Maricchia stayed at home to nurse her children, and her mother went out to work in the fields with the men, just like a man,—to weed, to dig, to guide the animals, to dress the vines, whether it were during the Greek-Levant winds[13] of January, or during the August sirocco, when mules let their heads droop, and men sleep prone on their bellies under the shadow of the North wall.