Corri, corri, bagarozzi.’”
Which might be rendered: “Run, run, my noble roach; for to-morrow is Ascension day—Ascension day of the little loaves. Run, roach, run.”
“What demons of cruelty children can be!” remarked Isabel as the family went on.
Adriano laughed as he looked after them. “How queer these forestieri are!” he said. “They want to see everything and know the name of everything. The signorine here ask me the name of every tree and flower in the garden, and every bird and bug that moves. How should I know? My niece, Giovannina, says there’s an English-woman going about getting the poor old women to tell her fables, and ghost-stories, and all sorts of nonsense; and they say that she prints it in a book. They must be in great need of books to read. Then the padrona will stand and look at the moon as if she never saw nor heard of it before, and expected it to drop down into the garden and break into golden scudi. I saw her one day this spring, on Monte Cavallo, stand half an hour and stare at the sky, just because it was red where the sun went down. The sky is always red when the sun sets in clouds. Two or three signori thought she was stopping to be noticed, and they walked about her, and one of them leaned on the railing close to her, staring at her all the time, and by and by spoke to her. I went up behind her, but she didn’t know I was there. She hadn’t seen any one till she heard the man say good-evening to her. You should have seen the way she looked at him. Then she caught sight of me. 'Adriano,’ she said, 'I’ll give you a hundred lire to fling that fellow over the terrace head first.’ I told her that it would cost me more than a hundred lire to do it. She put out her lips—I suppose she thought I was a coward—and muttered a word in English. Then she said to me, as she turned her back on the man, loud enough for him to hear: 'How dare such rascals come up when the sun shines!’ But she wouldn’t let me walk beside her, but made me follow her all the way home. And she was so mad that, when I started to say something as we reached the door, she stopped me. 'When I want you to speak, I shall ask you a question,’ she said.”
“The Signora is very kind,” Annunciata said.
“I didn’t say she wasn’t,” the man replied dogmatically. “But it doesn’t become ladies to go into the street alone, nor to stop to look at anything, nor to glance about them.”
The girl did not reply. She had been trained in the same opinions, and did not know how to combat them. But sometimes it seemed to her that the streets and the public places were for women as well as for men to see, and that a woman should not be a prisoner because she had not a carriage or a servant to attend her. Moreover, she sympathized, in her simple way, with many of the Signora’s tastes. To her the song of the birds they fed with crumbs from the windows was a sort of thanks, and she regarded them as little Christians; and now and then, when she looked at the sky, something stirred in her for which she had not words—a pleasure and a pain, and a sense of being cramped into a place too small for her. She could not express it all, and did not quite understand it. But there was just enough consciousness to make Adriano’s pronunciamiento rankle a little. The inner ferment lasted while she polished the knives and her companion blacked carefully a pair of boots; then she burst forth with an expression of opinion which astonished even herself, for it sprang into speech before she had well seen its meaning—an involuntary assertion of nature. “I believe that women should settle their own business, and men settle theirs,” she said. “I haven’t seen the man yet that knows enough to teach the Signora how she ought to behave nor what she ought to do; and many’s the man she could teach. Men are poor creatures. Women can’t do anything with them without lying to ’em. That’s what gives them such a great opinion of themselves, because most women flatter them when they want to get anything out of them.”
“Ma, che!—well, to be sure!” exclaimed Adriano. It wasn’t worth arguing about. He merely laughed.
Meantime, gathered in the sala, the family made plans for the coming days while they waited for supper. Bianca, seated at the piano, was trying to recall a fragment of melody she had heard a soprano of the papal choir sing at a festa not long before. “The cadence was so sweet,” she said. “It was common—a slow falling from five and sharp four to four natural—but the singer put in two grace-notes that I never heard there before. He touched the four natural lightly, then sharped it, then touched the third and slid to the fourth. It was exquisite, and very gracefully done. His voice was pure and true, and the intervals quite distinct.”
“I asked his name,” Isabel said, “and was disgusted to hear a very common one, which I have forgotten. A beautiful singer ought to have a beautiful, birdy-sounding name.”