“They must be as high as the campanile, then! And new! In Venice all the houses are so old. I like new things. Don’t you?”
“Well—not so much,” replied the painter. “It is hard to tell which of them will last. Old things are ones that were good enough to last.”
“Oh!” said the fisherman. “What are the people like?”
“The people? They are like you and me. Only perhaps they don’t like to lie all the afternoon in the sun, the way you and I do,” he added, stretching his arms out wide in the sand and following a gull into the sky.
“Are they good?” pursued the fisherman. Goodness as applied to character has come in Italian to mean compliance rather than the sterner moral qualities expected in the North.
“Well, perhaps they are more apt to be ‘bad’ if one is from another country. I think it is because they do not understand. They speak another language, you know.”
“Can you understand it?”
“M-m-m, generally.”
“Say some!” demanded the fisherman. And after it he required a translation of the painter’s phrase. “It is strange,” he commented. “When you say those words I understand nothing; but you are saying the same things that we say in Italian!”
“Yes,” said the painter. “They do not tell you new things in other countries. At first it sounds different, and then you find out that it is really the same....”