‘The living have a few rights—even in Rome.’
‘They seem to have a good many,’ Dessart agreed. ‘Oh, I know what you reformers want! You’d like to see the city full of smoke-stacks and machinery, and the Campagna laid out in garden plots, and everybody getting good wages and six per cent. interest; with all the people dressed alike in ready-made clothing instead of peasant costume, and nobody poor and nobody picturesque.’
Sybert did not reply for a moment, as with half-shut eyes he studied the distance. He was thinking of a ride he had taken three days before. He had gone out with a hunting-party to one of the great Campagna estates, owned by a Roman prince whose only interest in the land was to draw from it every possible centesime of income. They had stopped to water their horses at a cluster of straw huts where the farm labourers lived, and Sybert had dismounted and gone into one of them to talk to the people. It was dark and damp, with a dirt floor and rude bunks along the sides. There, fifty human beings lived crowded together, breathing the heavy, pestilential air. They had come down to bands from their mountain homes, searching for work, and had sold their lives to the prince for thirty cents a day.
The picture flashed across him now of their pale, apathetic faces, of the dumb reproach in their eyes, and for a second he felt tempted to describe it. But with the reflection that neither of the two before him would care any more about it than had the landlord prince, he changed his expression into a careless shrug.
‘It will be some time before we’ll see that,’ he answered Dessart’s speech.
‘But you’d like it, wouldn’t you?’ Marcia persisted.
‘Yes; wouldn’t you?’
‘No,’ she laughed, ‘I can’t say that I should! I decidedly prefer the peasants as they are. They are far more attractive when they are poor, and since they are happy in spite of it, I don’t see why it is our place to object.’
Sybert eyed the pavement impassively a moment: then he raised his head and turned to Marcia. He swept her a glance from head to foot which took in every detail of her dainty gown, her careless grace as she leaned against the balustrade, and he made no endeavour to conceal the look of critically cold contempt in his eyes. Marcia returned his glance with an air of angry challenge; not a word was spoken, but it was an open declaration of war.