“A picture! And where would you hang it?”
Mattina thought for a moment.
“I do not know,” she said at last, “but it would be mine, and I could look at it every day.”
“You! with your seas, and your rocks, and your island!” exclaimed the older girl as she stooped to pick up her crochet work which had fallen off her knees. “Even if it were Paris, you could not make more fuss about it.”
“What is Paris?”
“Paris is the country from where Madmazella comes. She says it is a thousand times more beautiful than Athens.”
Mattina looked about her, at the women who sat chatting before the narrow doorways behind which were occasional glimpses of crowded courtyards and linen spread out to dry, at the dirty little trickle of water along the sidewalk with its accustomed burden of rotting lettuce leaves, at the children scrambling and shouting in the thick dust of the road, and sighed. She could not have told why she sighed, nor have put into words what she found so ugly about her, so she only said:—
“Perhaps it is better there than here.”
That Athens has beauties of its own, which people travel from distant lands to see, she knew not. Its charms were not for her. When she walked out with Taki and Bebeko, the pavements hurt her badly shod feet, and the glare of the tall white houses hurt her eyes. As for the beautiful Royal Gardens with their old trees and their shady paths, their pergolas, their palms, their orange trees and their sheets of violets, as for the Zappion[17] from whose raised terrace one can see the columns of the old Temple of Jupiter, the Acropolis,[18] the marble Stadium,[19] and Phalerum and the sea, all of which together make what is perhaps the most beautiful view in all Europe, … she had never been there! Those were walks for the rich and well-born children whom she sometimes saw wheeled about in little carriages by foreign nurses who were dressed all in white with little black bonnets tied with white strings. How could she lug two heavy children so far? No, Athens for her was made up of hot narrow streets, of much noise and hard pavements.
The very next morning while she was sweeping out the passage, she saw Antigone in her best dress and her hat with the pink flowers, beckoning to her from outside the house.