“Behold, Signora mia, this priceless flounce. How well it would become you on a vesture of ceremony!”
She spread out with a caressing touch a deep lace flounce of Milan point. It was indeed “an unique object.” The sacred letters IHS and all the emblems of the Passion were wrought into it with wonderful freedom of design,—the ladder, the cross, the mallet, and so on. It had evidently been made for an ecclesiastic.
“It is truly a splendid piece of lace, Sora Giulia, but is it not known to you that such a flounce may only be worn by a sacerdote?”
“I preti sono poveri!”
“Not all priests are poor. Show it to Don Marcello.”
“Ma chè—, he buys no longer, he has to sell. But you, Signora, you are not like these others. Eh dica, lei è veramente Christiana? (Say, are you really a Christian?)”
Was not her eagerness not to have me a Christian pathetically significant? My mother remembers her Hebrew master, a scholarly Jew, taking hurried farewells of her in order to get back to the ghetto before the gates were shut at eight!
“I cannot buy this flounce. I could not wear it if I did.”
“Per carità, then look at this reticella.” (Literally “small net,” a coarse white netting with designs worked in by hand.) “The forestieri are mad about reticelle, they are buying them all up to make table-cloths and pillow covers. Soon it will be impossible to find them. I never saw a better piece, you shall have it at your own price. In confidence, the padrone di casa says if he is not paid his rent to-day he will turn us out. What a bad season we have had! No travellers since June. Those Florentine antiquarians put lies in the papers about there being plague or cholera, or some such porcheria in Rome, just to keep the voyagers away from us. We make nothing; but we must eat and pay our rent all the same! The padrone....”
“With respect, he is an infamous beast, they all are, Madonna mia!” Nena broke in. When she took Sora Giulia’s part I knew that the antiquarian was really in straits. We bought the reticella for the sum due the landlord, and Nena went downstairs to the baker’s shop to change the bill.