Veronica turned her back upon the villa, as she had turned from the great palace in the Toledo.  They whispered to her that the peasant’s rent must not be reduced, for he was well able to pay, and they pointed to the closely planted vines and vegetables and olives that stretched far away to right and left, where she remembered in her dreams of far childhood that there had been lawns and walks and flowers.  The man, she was told, was not the only peasant on the place.  There were other houses now, and huts that could shelter a family, and there was land, land, always more land, as far as she could see, all as closely and neatly and regularly planted with vegetables and grain, vines and olives; and it was all hers, and yielded enormous rents which were wisely invested.  She was very rich indeed, but to her it all seemed horribly sordid and grinding and mean—­and the peasants looked prematurely old, labour-worn, filthy, wretchedly poor.  If she had even had any satisfaction from so much wealth, it might have seemed different.  She said so, in her heart.  She was accustomed to tell her confessor that she was proud and uncharitable and unfeeling—­not finding any real misdeeds to confess.  She was willing to believe that she was all that and much more.  If she had been living in the whirling, golden pleasure-storm of an utterly thoughtless world, she believed herself bad enough to have shut her memory’s eyes to the haggard peasant-mother of the dirty half-clad children—­to all the hundreds of them who doubtless lived just like the one she had seen, all upon her lands; she could have forgotten the busy-thieving, sodden-faced crowd that thronged the chambers wherein her fathers had been born and had feasted kings and had died—­the very room where her own father had lain dead.  She could have shut it all out, she thought, if she had held in her hands the gold that all this brought, to scatter it at her will; for she was sure that she had not a better heart than other girls of her age.  But she had never seen it.  The reality of her own life was too weak and colourless, by contrast, to make the name of fortune an excuse for the sordid facts of meanness.  There was no splendour about her, no wild gaiety, none of the glorious extravagance of conscious young wealth, and there was very little amusement to divert her thoughts.  The people she would have liked to know were kept at a distance from her.  She was advised not to buy the things which attracted her eyes, and was told that they were not so good as they looked, and that on the whole it was better to keep money than to spend it—­but that, of course, she might do as she pleased, and that when she wanted money her uncle Macomer would give it to her.

It all passed through his hands, and he managed everything, with the assistance of Lamberto Squarci the notary and of other men of business—­mostly shabby-looking men in black, with spectacles and unhealthy complexions, who came and went in the morning when old Macomer was in his study attending to affairs.  Veronica knew none but Squarci by name, and never spoke with any of them.  There seemed to be no reason why she should.