The naturalism of Matilde Serao deserves to be distinguished from that of the French contemporaries with whom she is commonly classed. She has a fiercer passion, more of the true ardour of the South, than Zola or Maupassant, but her temperament is distinctly related to that of Daudet. She is an idealist working in the school of realism; she climbs, on scaffolding of minute prosaic observation, to heights which' are emotional and often lyrical. But her most obvious merit is the acuteness with which she has learned to collect and arrange in artistic form the elements of the town life of Southern Italy. She still retains in her nature something of the newspaper reporter's quicksilver, but it is sublimated by the genius of a poet.
CHAPTER PAGE PART I 1 I. 3 II. 19 III. 46 IV. 70 V. 86 VI. 114 VII. 128 PART II 149 I. 151 II. 170 III. 188 IV. 215 V. 249
Motionless under the white coverlet of her bed, Anna appeared to have been sleeping soundly for the past two hours.
Her sister Laura, who occupied a little cot at the other end of the big room, had that evening much prolonged her customary reading, which followed the last gossip of the day between the girls. But no sooner had she put out her candle than Anna opened her eyes and fixed them upon Laura's bed, which glimmered vaguely white in the distance.
She dared not move, she dared not even sigh; and all her life was in her gaze, trying to penetrate the secret of the dusk--trying to see whether really her sister was asleep. It was a winter's night, and as the hour advanced the room became colder and colder; but Anna did not feel it.
The moment the light had been extinguished a flame had leapt from her heart to her brain, diffusing itself through all her members, scalding her veins, scorching her flesh, quickening the beating of her pulses. As in the height of fever, she felt herself burning up; her tongue was dry, her head was hot; and the icy air that entered her lungs could not quench the fire in her, could not subdue the tumultuous irruption of her young blood.
Often, to relieve herself, she had longed to cry out, to moan; but the fear of waking Laura held her silent. It was not, however, so much from the great heat throbbing at her temples that she suffered, as from her inability to know for certain whether her sister was asleep.