It was not that she meant to study political economy, or socialism, nor to give the name of an experiment to anything she did.  She had been struck by the practical necessity for doing something, when Don Teodoro had first written to her about the condition of the people in Muro, and her own observations made on her farms in the Falernian district—­one of the richest corners of vine land in all Italy—­had convinced her that some sort of action was urgently necessary.  And if, in the midst of such riches, the Falernian peasants were half starved, what must be the state of the people on her lands in the Basilicata?  Don Teodoro had drawn her an accurate picture, full of those plain details which carry more than the weight of their mere words.  Something should be done at once.  She had given him power and money to help the very poorest, before she came; but her common sense told her that the evil lay too deep in the soil to be reached by a light shower of silver—­or even by a storm of gold rain.

Inventors, great or small, are rarely theorists; the invention must be suited to the necessity, before all things, and the theory may come afterwards if anybody cares for it.  For a theory is nothing but an attempted explanation, and the fact must exist before it can possibly need explaining.  Bread is a great invention against hunger, and a man needs to know nothing about the gastric juices to save himself from starvation when the loaf is in his hand.  Veronica meant to put the loaves where they were needed, within reach of those who needed them.

As she was driven through the rugged country on that May afternoon, she felt that she had a future before her, that she was going into action, and leaving stagnation behind, and that her own life, which was to be her very own, was just beginning.  It was to be a life quite different from the existence of any one she knew, for, unlike the lives of her friends, hers was to have an integral, independent existence of its own, with one determined object for all its activity.

The months she had passed in Bianca’s house had rather strengthened than weakened the unformulated resolution which she had first vaguely reached in the dark days after Bosio’s death.  There had been much solitude, and many rides and drives into the country with her beautiful, silent friend; and there had been very little contact with the world to disturb the onward current of her thoughts.  More than all, the first breath of liberty after long restraint had enlarged and widened her determination to be always free, in spite of the world, and society, and the drone of the busy-bodies’ gossip.  In her heart, the memory of Bosio had grown in dignity, till it was solemn and imposing out of all proportion with what the man himself had been, even as Veronica had known him.  To know the truth of what his real life had been would have shaken her own to its foundations.  But there was no fear of that; and now, her chief companion was to be the priest who had loved him as a friend.  Possibly that last fact had even influenced her a little in her final determination to live at Muro, rather than in any other of four or five equally habitable or uninhabitable places which she owned, and where she might have begun her work under circumstances quite as favourable to success.