"That's impossible! You were too calm a little while ago!"
"One can pretend," she said, with a forced smile, which furrowed her cheek like a sign of pain.
"A little while ago?" he repeated, closing his hand and shaking it on a level with her face. "Then why do you say every one believes it? Have you just learned that too? Did you hear it from that—that—I don't know what to call her—there is no word——And you—you aren't ashamed to demean yourself to such scandal-mongering with a creature like that, a degenerate——You——" he continued, forcing himself to scorn, "you, the superior woman, the exceptional fastidious woman, the great lady—the great lady!" he repeated, raising and coarsening his voice.
Then Regina fired up. Sombre redness made her face from forehead to chin a circle of fire; in their turn her hands were agitated in tragic gesticulation.
"Antonio, hush!" she said, not looking at him. "What do you expect? Life is like that—stupid and vulgar. The most horrible things are revealed by the gossip of silly women, and whole dramas are played on the high road in the course of an evening walk. It wouldn't do if that happened in a novel! The author would be accused of vulgarity, if not of nonsense. In real life, on the contrary, see what happens. The grand lady goes to a garret in Via San Lorenzo to discover the cause of her unhappiness; the superior woman comes out into the street to——"
"Regina, have done! have done!" cried Antonio. "You reason too much and too coldly for you to believe what you are saying. No, it is not true! You do not believe it! Tell me you don't believe it!"
And he tried to take her arm, but this time it was she who repulsed him.
"Let me alone! That is what you men are! If I had been another woman, another sort of wife, I should have lain in wait for you at home, like a tigress in her lair. I should have made a scene, one of those scenes called strong, which are so pleasing at the theatre or in a novel. Whereas, I have spoken to you quite quietly. I repeat a thing which every one is saying, and I ask nothing better than that we should laugh at it together. But you—you begin with noisy words, 'aren't you ashamed,' and 'scandal-mongering,' and 'the great lady.' Yes, certainly, I am a lady; more of a lady than those other women. It is just that I don't value conventionalities; that is the calamity."