‘Well, then, Padre Filippo said,’ continued the narrator, ‘“Now just to try whether she cares so much about you, you give her thirty scudi a month.”’
‘Fifteen pauls a day,’ interposed the charwoman.
‘Thirty scudi a month!’ reiterated the narrator.
‘Never mind,’ said I. ‘Whatever it was, it was to be reduced.’
‘Yes; that’s it,’ pursued the narrator; ‘and he made him go on and on diminishing it. She took it very well at first, suspecting he was trying her, and thinking he would make it up to her afterwards.’
‘But when she found he didn’t,’ said the charwoman,
‘She turned him out,’ said the narrator, putting her down with a frown. ‘He was so infatuated, however, that even now he was not satisfied, and said that in stopping the money he had been unfair, and she was in the right. So good Philip, who was patience itself, said, “Go and pay her up, and we’ll try her another way. You go and kill a dog, and put it in a bag, and go to her with your hands covered with blood, and let her think you have got into trouble for hurting some one, and ask her to hide you.” So the man went and killed a dog.’
‘It was a cat he killed, because he couldn’t find a dog handy,’ said the irrepressible charwoman.
‘Nonsense; of course it was a dog,’ asseverated the narrator. ‘But when he went to her house and pretended to be in a bad way, and asked her to have pity on him, she only answered: “Not I, indeed! I’m not going to get myself into a scrape[6] with the law, for him!” and drove him away. And he came and told Padre Filippo.
‘“Now,” said good Philip, “go to your wife whom you have abandoned so long. Go to her with the same story, and see what she does for you.”