They looked at each other with such mutual pity that only shame of the passers-by kept them from bursting into sobs.
'Good-bye!'
'Good-bye, Carmela!'
The suffering girl kissed the baby softly. Annarella, with the languid step of a woman who has had too many children and worked too hard, went off by the Santa Chiara cloister, pulling her two other little ones behind her. Carmela, pulling her discoloured shawl round her, dragging her down-at-heel shoes, went down towards Banchi Nuovi. It was just there a cleanly-dressed youth, his trousers tight at the knees and wide as bells over the ankle, with a neat jacket, and hat over one ear, stopped her with the look of his clear, cold, light-blue eyes, biting lips, as red as a girl's, under his fair little moustache. Stopping before she spoke to him, Carmela looked with such intense passion on the young fellow she seemed to wish to enfold him in an atmosphere of love. He did not seem to notice it.
'Well, have you won anything?' he asked in a hissing little ironical voice.
'Nothing,' said she, opening her arms desolately. She held down her head so as not to weep, looking at the point of her shoes, which had lost their varnish and showed the dirty lining through a split.
'How do you account for that?' the young fellow cried out angrily. 'A woman is always a woman!'
'Is it my fault if the numbers won't come out?' the love-lorn girl said humbly and sadly.
'You should look out for the good ones. Go to Father Illuminato that knows them, and only tells women; go to Don Pasqualino, he that the good spirits help to find out the right numbers. Get it out of your head, my girl, that I can marry a ragged one like you.'