“Reverendo,” replied Oreste, quietly, “perhaps not so much folly as some of you have thought. Perhaps I know what the tongues up there wag like, and if I choose not to mind, whose affair is that? If it pleases us to please ourselves, who is the worse for that?”
“And the scandal!” exclaimed the priest. “And the waste, and the ideas you are putting in Gioja’s head,—the wicked vanity and pride—Oh, I told the Signorina how it would end!”
“As for that, Reverendo, you will pardon me; but tongues must wag when they are hung in the middle, and if they wag about Gioja,—why it does n’t hurt her, and some one else goes safe. And as for the waste,—the price of a fare now and then,—why if it suits us to live on polenta six days, and take our pleasure on the seventh, whose misery is that? I have never yet lacked my soldo for the Church or for a neighbor poorer than I.”
“And the ideas you are encouraging in her unhappy head!—but I will have something to say to that child.”
“Reverendo,” interposed Oreste, sternly, “by your leave,—you are a good man, half a saint, and I am only an ignorant peasant, but there are some things priests and nuns do not understand, and what one does not understand, that one should not meddle with. The Signorina understood; she knew well it was neither pride nor vanity in Gioja, but just a kind of poesia which made her like to play the signora. The Signorina understood because she herself was full of poesia.”
“Oh, the Signorina,—the Signorina!” interjected the priest, in despair.
“She knew,” Oreste went on. “You remember the time of the hat, Reverendo?”
“If I remember!” groaned the priest.
“Ebbene!” said Oreste, emphatically, “when I found it out, I went straight to the Signorina and told her. She was on the terrace, and she sat down and laughed a little. You remember our Signorina’s way of laughing?”
It was to the priest that he addressed this; but it was the Signore, looking straight before him and smiling, who looked as if he remembered.