Beatrice and Emilia, strolling together in one of the flowery
lanes up the hillside, between ranks of the omnipresent poplar,
and rose-bush hedges, or crumbling pink-stuccoed walls that
dripped with cyclamen and snapdragon, met old Marietta
descending, with a basket on her arm.
Marietta courtesied to the ground.
"How do you do, Marietta?" Beatrice asked.
"I can't complain, thank your Grandeur. I have the lumbago on
and off pretty constantly, and last week I broke a tooth. But
I can't complain. And your Highness?"
Marietta returned, with brisk aplomb.
Beatrice smiled. "Bene, grazie. Your new master--that young
Englishman," she continued, "I hope you find him kind, and easy
to do for?"
"Kind--yes, Excellency. Also easy to do for. But--!" Marietta
shrugged her shoulders, and gave her head two meaning
oscillations.
"Oh--?" wondered Beatrice, knitting puzzled brows.
"Very amiable, your Greatness; but simple, simple," Marietta
explained, and tapped her brown old forehead with a brown
forefinger.
"Really--?" wondered Beatrice.
"Yes, Nobility," said Marietta. "Gentle as a canarybird, but
innocent, innocent."
"You astonish me," Beatrice avowed. "How does he show it?"
"The questions he asks, Most Illustrious, the things he says."
"For example--?" pursued Beatrice.
"For example, your Serenity--" Marietta paused, to search her
memory.--" Well, for one example, he calls roast veal a fowl.
I give him roast veal for his luncheon, and he says to me,
'Marietta, this fowl has no wings.' But everyone knows, your
Mercy, that veal is not a fowl. How should veal have wings?"
"How indeed?" assented Beatrice, on a note of commiseration.
And if the corners of her mouth betrayed a tendency to curve
upwards, she immediately compelled them down. "But perhaps he
does not speak Italian very well?" she suggested.
"Mache, Potenza! Everyone speaks Italian," cried Marietta.
"Indeed?" said Beatrice.
"Naturally, your Grace--all Christians," Marietta declared.
"Oh, I did n't know," said Beatrice, meekly. "Well," she
acknowledged, "since he speaks Italian, it is certainly
unreasonable of him to call veal a fowl."
"But that, Magnificence," Marietta went on, warming to her
theme, "that is only one of his simplicities. He asks me, 'Who
puts the whitewash on Monte Sfiorito? 'And when I tell him
that it is not whitewash, but snow, he says, 'How do you know?'
But everyone knows that it is snow. Whitewash!"
The sprightly old woman gave her whole body a shake, for the
better exposition of her state of mind. And thereupon, from
the interior of her basket, issued a plaintive little squeal.