take care of that child?” he concluded abruptly.
For a soiled little wretch was sitting directly in the street, on a cushion of dust, and staring contentedly at the soldiers as they passed, as unconscious and unafraid as if it had been a poppy sprung up there between the paving-stones, instead of a human being with a body out of which the soul might be kicked or crushed.
“Somebody is taking care of it,” Bianca said. “Everybody is taking care of it.”
In fact, the long line of soldiers made a tiny curve to accommodate this bit of humanity, and the tide of life passing at the other side made another, like a brook around a stick or stone. At length a woman, not too much afraid, certainly, snatched the child away, and, in the face of the world, administered a sound castigation, the meaning of which, it was to be hoped, the child understood.
“I never saw such countryfied things happen in any other city,” Mr. Vane said. “It is, perhaps, one reason why life here is so picturesque. Nobody, except the small class of cultivated people, behaves any differently in public from what they do in private, and the common people do not pretend to be what they are not.”
“I wish sometimes that they were a little less sincere,” the Signora remarked coldly. “One could spare that portion of the picturesque which offends against decency. They seem to have no respect for public opinion; though, perhaps,” she added, “public opinion here is not worthy of much respect. It tolerates strange customs, certainly. The workmen hammer away and saw stone all day Sunday at the house opposite, and nobody protests,
that I know of. Some clergymen did think of complaining against the work going on on Sunday in the piazza above, but it would have been in vain for them, of course. Let us go to luncheon, please. I am in danger of becoming ill-natured, so many things here annoy me. Do you remember the old Protestant missionary hymn about ‘Greenland’s icy mountains’? Two lines of it often occur to me here:
‘Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile.’
I shall think better of them when I have had something to eat. Hunger makes one critical. I fancy that critics are always badly-fed people. I’m very sure that if Dr. Johnson had had a comfortable dinner before he sat down to my last book, he would never have cut it up so—the book, I mean. A good roastbeef would have taken the edge quite off his blade. A dinner,” said the Signora, waxing eloquent as she seated herself at a very pretty and plentiful table—“a dinner is the most powerful of engines, and wealth is powerful only because it will procure dinners. A person whom you have fed is obliged to serve you, and the person whom you are going to feed never finds you ugly or uninteresting.”