“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.”