Perhaps such a being as Marcello would be an impossibility anywhere but in Italy.  Modern life tears privacy to tatters, and privacy is the veil of the temple of home, within which every extreme of human development is possible, good and bad.  Take privacy away and all the strangely compound fractions of humanity are soon reduced to a common denomination.  In Italy life has more privacy than anywhere else west of Asia.  The Englishman is fond of calling his home his castle, but it is a thoroughfare, a market-place, a club, a hotel, a glass house, compared with that of an average Italian.  An Englishman goes home to escape restraint:  an Italian goes out.  But the northern man, who lives much in public, learns as a child to conceal what he feels, to be silent, to wear an indifferent look; whereas the man of the south, who hides nothing when the doors of his house are shut, can hide but little when he meets his enemy in the way.  He laughs when he is pleased, and scowls when he is not, threatens when he is angry, and sheds tears when he is hurt, with a simplicity that too often excites the contempt of men accustomed to suffer or enjoy without moving a muscle.

Privacy favours the growth of individual types, differing widely from each other; the destruction of it makes people very much alike.  Marcello’s mother asked herself whether she had done well in rearing him as a being apart from those amongst whom he must spend his life.

And yet, as she looked at him, he seemed to be so nearly the ideal of which she had dreamt throughout long years of loving care that she was comforted, and the shadow passed away from her sweet face.  He had answered that she could do nothing that was not right; she prayed that his words might be near the truth, and in her heart she was willing to believe that they were almost true.  Had she not followed every good impulse of her own good heart?  Had she not tried to realize literally for him the most beautiful possibilities of the Christian faith?  That, at least, was true, and she could tell herself so without any mistaken pride.  How, then, had she made any mistake?  The boy had the face of a young saint.

“Are you ready, my dear?” she asked suddenly, as a far-off clock struck.

“Yes, mother, quite ready.”

“I am not,” she answered with a little laugh.  “And Folco is waiting, and I hear the carriage driving up.”

She slipped from Marcello’s side and left the room quickly, for they were going to drive down to the sea, to a little shooting-lodge that belonged to them near Nettuno, a mere cottage among the trees by the Roman shore, habitable only in April and May, and useful only then, when the quail migrate along the coast and the malarious fever is not yet to be feared.  It was there that Marcello had first learned to handle a gun, spending a week at a time there with his stepfather; and his mother used to come down now and then for a day or two on a visit, sometimes bringing