“I don’t know what sort of ladies you have ruined,” said she, “but you have a pleasant manner of reparation.  The scratch on my cheek smarts, but not unduly—­my foot is as sound as ever it was.”  She helped me perch the faggot on my head, and we walked on together.  This last generosity had touched me.

Her name, she told me, was Virginia Strozzi, and her people were very poor folk of Condoglia.  Condoglia was a village on a spur of the mountains, the property, with the bodies and souls of its inhabitants, of a great lord, a marchese.  She was sixteen years old and had never tasted meat.  Condoglia was but a mile away; it was getting dark.  Would I spend the night there?  “Your honour must not look for decency,” she said with a sad patience which was very touching to me; “you can judge of what you will find by what you see of me.  Rags cover my leanness and wattles cover my rags.  As I am, so are my father and mother, sisters and brothers—­and so I suspect were theirs.  You will sleep on litter, you will eat black bread, and drink foul water.  It is what we do year in and year out, except that sometimes we go without the bread.  What do you say?”

“I say,” I replied, “that I am thankful for your kindness to one who has used you ill.  My maladroitness was horrible.”

“Your amendment was, however, handsomely done,” she said—­and added fiercely, “Let me tell you that nobody has ever touched my foot with his lips before.  I owe you for that.”

“You are generous indeed, Virginia,” I said; “I shall be proud to be in your debt for a lodging.”  We were not long in reaching Condoglia, which, so far as I could see, was no more than a row of hovels on the summit of a crag; and then we entered the meanest dwelling I have ever seen.

It was like a gipsy’s tent, made of mud, thatched with furze, and consisted of a single room, on whose floor of beaten dung huddled a family of starving wretches—­hollow-eyed, pale, gaunt, and almost naked; a round dozen of them.  There were a man, bright and peaked with hunger; a poor drudge of a woman, worn to a rag before her time, with a dying child upon her empty breast; a grown son and seven children—­all crouched there close together like pigs in a yard to keep life in their bodies.  I saw no signs of food, and I reflected that outside this misery and want the rich Tuscan earth was a-steam with fecund heat, and bore a thousandfold for every germinating seed.  To them, faint and desperate as they were, the entrance of Virginia, herself as thin as a rod, and of myself, a stranger, caused no surprise.  They looked to the door as we came in, but neither stirred nor spoke; indeed, it was Virginia who did what was necessary.  She brought from her bosom a loaf of rye-bread; she fetched a flask of oil; she broke up the one and soaked it in the other and distributed the victual—­first to the guest, then to the children and her parents, last to herself.  The bread was musty, the oil rank;