“Your Reverence,” said Saridda, with her nose at the grating, “Compare Nino makes me commit sin every Sunday in church.”
“In what way, my daughter?”
“He was to have married me, before there was all this talk in the place; but now that the marriage is broken off, he goes and stands near the high altar, and stares at me, and laughs with his friends, all the time holy mass is going on.”
And when his Reverence tried to touch Nino’s heart the countryman replied—
“No, it is she who turns her back on me whenever she sees me—just as if I were a beggar!”
He, on the other hand, if Gnà Saridda passed across the square on Sundays, gave himself airs as if he had been the brigadier, or some other great personage, and did not even seem to see her. Saridda was exceedingly busy preparing little coloured paper-lanterns, and put them out in a row on the window-sill, in his very face, under the pretext of hanging them out to dry. Once they found themselves together in church, at a christening, and took no notice of each other, just as though they had never met before; nay, Saridda even Went so far as to flirt with the godfather.
“A poor sort of a godfather!” sneered Nino. “Why the child’s a girl! And when a girl is born, even the beams of the roof break down!”
Saridda turned away, and pretended to be talking to the baby’s mother.
“What’s bad does not always come to do harm. Sometimes, when you think you’ve lost a treasure, you ought to thank God and St. Pasquale; for you can never say you know a person till you have eaten seven measures of salt.”
“After all, one must take troubles as they come, and the worst possible way is to worry one’s self about things which are not worth the trouble. When one Pope’s dead they make another.”