“Your son is a Sicilian. At the port they call him ‘Il Siciliano.’”
“Do they?”
Her intellect seemed to be collapsing. She looked almost bovine.
Hermione’s excitement began to be complicated by a feeling of hot anger.
“But don’t you know it? You must know it!”
The parrot shuffled slowly along the board, coming nearer to them, and bowing its head obsequiously. Hermione could not help watching its movements with a strained attention. Its presence distracted her. She had a longing to take it up and wring its neck. Yet she loved birds.
“You must know it!” she repeated, no longer looking at Maddalena.
“Si!”
All ignorance and all stupidity were surely enshrined in that word thus said.
“Where did you know Gaspare?”