“They know all about it,” he replied, “especially Giovanni, he knows everything. But they don’t say it because they like to go on talking.”
“There! now you have done it a third
time. You appear to me to know all about it too. How did you find it all out? They did not teach it you at school, did they?”
“I do not remember that any one ever taught it me,” he replied; “I seem to have known it always. It cannot be otherwise. It is like eating cheese with maccaroni.”
“We seldom eat maccaroni in England,” said I, in defence, “and when we do we usually eat sugar with it; perhaps that is why we are so slow.”
This was a mistake because I wanted him to talk more about the theatre, and there is something quicksilverish in Micio’s temperament; having got on the maccaroni he did not care to return to art.
“What do you eat in England if you do not eat maccaroni? Do you eat chocolate?”
Which reintroduced the original question, and when we had attended to that, it was nearly four o’clock, his sister’s dinner-hour and time for him to go home.
In the natural order of things, Micio, being the son of artists, will return to the stage. Should he fail as an adult actor, he will perhaps travel in tiles or in ecclesiastical millinery, or he may get employment on the railway, or as a clerk in the office of the
cemetery. I should like to know when the time comes, for I feel towards him somewhat as he feels towards Pietro Longo. And there is a chance that he will tell me, for we promised to exchange postcards, and before parting he gave me his address—