“As far as I am concerned,” said Pentoni, smiling and shrugging her shoulders, “if you do not regret it—”
New applause, new congratulations, amid bursts of laughter.
The following day the whole city was filled with the amazing news. Biagio Speranza, stroking his fine blond beard with his fat, white hand, laughed with his limpid blue eyes, and from time to time his hand passed quickly, with a gesture habitual with him, from his beard upward and beneath his bold nose. He was most content with the great folly he was about to commit. Folly in the opinion of stupid people, be it understood. He was conscious of acting well. He had thought it over all night long, and had almost died of laughing. “Carolinona, my wife!”
Friends and acquaintances stopped him on the streets. “You are joking, then?”—“No; I mean to marry, really to marry. But as a precaution, you understand? To protect myself from taking a wife, that is all.”—“What! But you are marrying!”—“Why, yes! I shall stay in my own home; I shall do as I please. I shall only go to her home as I do now, to dine. I shall not give her anything except the price of my meals, as usual. Well?”—“And your name?”—“But if she is willing, why not? It does not seem to me such a serious thing.”
And he left his questioner planted there in the middle of the street.
He had an appointment with Dario Scossi at the pension, to go over Carolinona’s papers together. At the pension besides Scossi, a witness for the groom, he found the timorous Martinelli, a witness for the bride, who had come purposely first of all to dissuade Signora Pentoni from lending herself to this highly scandalous proceeding.
“But do you think so?” she had replied, with a sad smile. “They are merry young fellows, let them alone. They were joking, and by this time think no more of it. I, on the other hand, have not been able to close my eyes all last night, thinking of that other in the hospital.”
But at the arrival of Scossi she had been amazed.
“What is this all about? Really? Again?”
Biagio Speranza found her obstinate in her refusal.