“Have your own way; I will do whatever you choose,” said Lucia, with a smile. “Still the flower jury is a pretty idea.... To feel the delight of colour, perfume, exquisite form: to examine the most delicate, mysterious, extraordinary of flowers, and among them to seek the beautiful, the perfect one, the flower of flowers.”
“After all, there would be no harm in your accepting ... Lucia,” suggested Alberto.
“Very well, then; I will accept for your sake—to please you, Signor Andrea, what do you think about it?”
“I am not a competent judge,” said Andrea, drily.
Lucia, as if from fatigue, then slipped her arm through his, and leant on it. He started, smiled, and then quickened his step, as if he would run away with her.... They were about to enter the hemp-room: there it was, in the rough, in bundles, then combed, spun and made up in skeins; a complete exhibition of it in every stage.
“Look, look at this mass of hemp; it is like the tresses of a Scandinavian maiden looking down from her balcony on the Baltic, awaiting her unknown lover. And this, paler still, so finely spun; might it not be the hair of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark? Oh, how full of meaning are all these things for me!”
“She sees things that people like us never see,” said Alberto, as if to himself. “Tell me, Signor Andrea, is it true that the lives of the hemp-spinners are as wretched as those of the unfortunate peasants who work in the rice plantations?”
“Not quite so bad, but nearly, Signora Lucia. Hemp-netting is done at midsummer, in the dog-days; a kind of heat that causes the exhalation of miasma. The water in which the hemp lies becomes putrid and poisons the atmosphere.”
“But do you know that what you’re telling me is odious? Do you know that our artificial life, that feeds on rural life, is an anthropophagous one? Do you know that the daily homicide.... Oh! let us go away, away from this place. This exhibition represents to me a place of human butchery.”
“There is a little exaggeration in this view of it,” he replied, not daring to contradict her flatly. “For the disease is decreasing, and fatal cases are growing less frequent. Landowners supply quinine gratis to the women who fall ill. Besides, if we think seriously on all things mundane, we shall perceive that human life needs these obscure sacrifices. Progress....”