"You love the peasants, don't you, Maurice?"
"Yes. Are you surprised?"
"No; at least I'm not surprised at your loving them."
"Well, then, Hermione?"
"Perhaps a little at the way you love them."
"What way's that?"
"Almost as they love each other—that's to say, when they love each other at all. Gaspare now! I believe you feel more as if he were a young brother of yours than as if he were your servant."
"Perhaps I do. Gaspare is terrible, a regular donna [1] of a boy in spite of all his mischief and fun. You should hear him talk of you. He'd die for his padrona."
"I believe he would. In love, the love that means being in love, I think Sicilians, though tremendously jealous, are very fickle, but if they take a devotion to any one, without being in love, they're rocks. It's a splendid quality."