Galimberti was so much surprised that he hesitated.
“Is not liberty dear to you?” she continued. “Are you not nauseated by the stifling atmosphere you live in? There is a means of reasserting your independence.”
“True,” he murmured. He did not dare to confess to her that leaving the aristocratic College would mean ruin and starvation to him. Thence he derived the chief part of his income—through them he obtained a few private lessons at the houses of his old pupils, by means of which he augmented the mite on which he lived, he in Naples, and his mother and sister in his native province. Without this, there would only remain to him an evening class for labouring people, by which he gained sixty francs a month: not enough to keep three people from dying of hunger. He was already too much ashamed of appearing to her, ugly, old, and unfortunate, without owning to being poverty-stricken besides.
“True,” he repeated despairingly.
“Why don’t you write to the Directress? If there be a conspiracy, she ought to be informed of it.”
“There is a conspiracy.... I feel it in the air about me.... I will write ... yes ... in a day or two.”
Then there was silence. Lucia stroked the folds of her Turkish wrapper. She took up her favourite album and in it wrote these lines of Boïto:
L’ebete vita
Vita che c’innamora
Lunga che pare un secolo
Breve che pare un ora.
She replaced the album on the table, and the gold pencil-case in her pocket.
“Will you believe in one thing, Signora Lucia?”