Lucia raised her perfumed handkerchief to her lips and stopped her nose with it. “This smell of cattle is not unhealthy,” said Andrea, naïvely. “Indeed, it is good for the health. Doctors prescribe it for consumptive people. Your perfumes are far more injurious, they deprave the senses and shatter the nerves.”
“Depravity is human.”
“That is why I prefer the beasts, whose instincts are always healthy. We have come to the end of this section. Here the finest of them all.”
It was a bull, a black bull with a white mark on its forehead, between its superb horns; a sturdy, majestic creature, contemptuous of its rack, to whom had been given a long cord and a wide enclosure: he tramped up and down his habitation without taking any notice of the onlookers, who expressed their timid admiration by whispered eulogies.
“Oh! how beautiful, how splendid!” cried Lucia.
“He is magnificent. He belongs to Piccirilli, of Casapulla we shall give him the prize. He is the pure exceptional type, the perfection of the breed. A masterpiece, Lucia ... What is the matter?”
“I feel rather faint, take me down there to the water. The sun is burning my arms, and my brain is on fire.”
They went as far as the little fountain, under a tree, where there was a wooden cup. He dipped a handkerchief in water and applied it to her forehead.
“Thank you, I am better; I felt as though I were dying. Let us return, or rather let us continue walking here, we are too isolated.”
They passed by the horse-boxes, a row of little wooden houses that were closed that day. They could hear the frequent neighings that came from under the semi-obscurity, under the wooden roofs that were grilled by the midday sun, and the restless impatient pawing of many hoofs.