“Indeed,” I exclaimed, “I know nothing of the sort.  I don’t in the least understand you.”  Her calmness, her unflinching regard were dreadful to me.  “Do you mean me to suppose that your father—?” I could not finish with the horrid thought.  She saved me that pain.

“My father has your money,” said she, “and would have kept me at home if he could.  But there he reckoned without his daughter.  I left home some three hours after you, and got here before you, as you see.”

I could not be indignant with her; there was that underlying her hardy speech which forbade precipitate judgment.

“My child,” I said, “what do you mean to do?”

She shrugged her thin shoulders.  “It is misery at home.  Here, in Pistoja, there is not apparent misery, nor need there be any.  Signer Francesco,” she said, “look at me.  I am sixteen years old, a marriageable girl, not ill-looking, not ill-made, starving, without a lover or the portion to buy one.  What is to be done with me?  What is to be the end of me?  It seems that the world has to answer me that question.  Am I to stop at Condoglia, and gnaw my knuckles, and work to the bone for another’s benefit, and kennel with dogs and chicken?  Why, my going will benefit them.  The chicken will have more to eat.  Or say that I do stop there—­what then?  Having nothing, needing much, I marry a man of my own nation, who has even less than nothing, and needs more than I do.  In fact, he needs me only that I may fend for him.  And then?  And then, Don Francesco?  More knuckles to be gnawed, more starving mouths to gnaw them, more dogs, more chicken to jostle for the pease-straw which I and my man and the children we choose to beget shall huddle on.  Life in Condoglia!  Ah, thank you for nothing, Don Francesco, if this is what you have bought for me with your fine gold piece.”

I was dismayed.  I was dumb at such a callous summing-up of my honest action.  All I could stammer out was some feeble, trite protest against a disordered life, which sounded insincere, but certainly was not that.  When I urged her in the name of religion to go home, she opened her eyes with an expression of scornful incredulity.  She was fully six years younger than me, and yet strangely my senior.  Without being told so, I had the intuition that to appeal to her on the part of religion was to invite failure.

“Do you ask me to agree with you?” she said slowly, “when I know what I know, and you so evidently know nothing?  Who, pray, are you to judge whether it be unwholesome to the soul for the body to sleep in a good bed—­you, who have rarely had a bad one?  And can you tell me that it is a sin to wash the body, and feed and clothe it delicately, when all your life long you have had ministers to yours, as of right?  What do you know of the inconvenience of the course I meditate when you have nothing with which to compare it?  You! to whom hunger and nakedness are an adventure—­ yes, an adventure; undertaken for a whim or a frolic,