“Yes, I heard the gun,” answered Marzio drily.  “It is the same as if you had told me,” he added ironically, as he turned and led the way across the street.

“A pretty answer!” exclaimed Maria Luisa, tossing her large head as she followed her lord and master to the door of their house.  Meanwhile Assunta, the old servant, glanced at Gianbattista, rolled up her eyes with an air of resignation, and spread out her withered hands for a moment with a gesture of despair, instantly drawing them in again beneath the folds of her grey woollen shawl.

“Gadding!” muttered Marzio, as he entered the narrow door from which the dark steps led abruptly upwards.  “Gadding—­always gadding!  And who minds the soup-kettle when you are gadding, I should like to know?  The cat, I suppose!  Oh, these women and their priests!  These priests and these women!”

“Lucia is minding the soup-kettle,” gasped Maria Luisa, as she puffed up stairs behind her thin and active husband.

“Lucia!” cried Marzio angrily, a flight of steps higher.  “I suppose you will bring her up to be woman of all work?  Well, she could earn her living then, which is more than you do!  After all, it is better to mind a soup-kettle than to thump a piano and to squeal so that I can hear her in the shop opposite, and it is better than hanging about the church all the morning, or listening to Paolo’s drivelling talk.  By all means keep her in the kitchen.”

It was hard to say whether Signora Pandolfi was puffing or sighing as she paused for breath upon the landing, but there was probably something of both in the labour of her lungs.  She was used to Marzio.  She had lived with him for twenty years, and she knew his moods and his ways, and detected the coming storm from afar.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, for her, there was little variety in the sequence of his ideas.  She was accustomed to his beginning at the grumbling stage before dinner, and proceeding by a crescendo movement to the pitch of rage, which was rarely reached until he had finished his meal, when he generally seized his hat and dragged Gianbattista away with him, declaring loudly that women were not fit for human society.  The daily excitement of this comedy had long lost its power to elicit anything more than a sigh from the stout Maria Luisa, who generally bore Marzio’s unreasonable anger with considerable equanimity, waiting for his departure to eat her boiled beef and salad in peace with Lucia, while old Assunta sat by the table with the cat in her lap, putting in a word of commiseration alternately with a word of gossip about the lodgers on the other side of the landing.  The latter were a young and happy pair:  the husband, a chorus singer at the Apollo, who worked at glove cleaning during the day time; his wife, a sempstress, who did repairs upon the costumes of the theatre.  Their apartments consisted of two rooms and a kitchen, while Marzio and his family occupied the rest of the floor, and entered their lodging by the opposite door.