CHAPTER XIV

MY HAPPY DAYS; THEIR UNHAPPY END

I lived in Pistoja for a month or more, very happily, without money in my pocket or a house to my name, to the benefit of my health and spirits and with no injury to my heart’s treasure.  I mean by that expression that I by no means, in the interests of my new surroundings, forgot Donna Aurelia; on the contrary, I assured Virginia every day that expiation was extremely necessary for me, and Aurelia’s restoration to her husband a vital part of it.  Virginia, without professing to understand me, fell in with my convictions; but she replied to them that my Aurelia must either have gone to Siena, or be about to go.  If the latter, we should be in the way to meet her by staying in Pistoja; if she was already at home with her mother, the more time we left for the soreness to subside the better it would be for all of us.  I fell in with this line of argument, which seemed to me unanswerable, because I was not then aware that the shorter way to Siena from Padua was by Arezzo.

I was now to learn that it was very possible, in a country where all classes save one were poor, to do away with the standard which obtains all over the civilised world, and to measure men, not by what they have, but by what they are.  For a man to be without money where others have much is to be without foothold—­the goal for any fribble’s shot of contempt.  It is as if he stood naked in a well-dressed assembly.  But where all are naked alike, no man need to be ashamed; and where all pockets are empty, it is not singular to be without them; your wit becomes your stock in the funds, and your right hand your ready money.  So, I say, I found it to be; but I believe that wit and ready hand were alike Virginia’s.  I may have caught at the theory—­hers was the practice.  Virginia’s opinion was that work for hire was either done by habit or on compulsion.  An ox, said she, draws the plough, because his race have always drawn it; a peasant works afield, because he is part of the soil’s economy.  He comes from it, he manures it, tills it, feeds off it, returns to it again.  It is his cradle, his meat, his shroud, his grave.  But in cities the case is altered.  Here man is predatory, solitary, prowling, not gregarious.  Here, for a man of wits, his fellows are the field which he tills.  He is the best husbandman who can tickle the soil to his easiest profit, who can grow the finest crop at the least pains, and get for little what is worth much.  What, she would say, do we need which the city will not give us for the reaching out of a hand?  Shelter?  A hundred houses stand empty week by week.  Take any one of them; they are there to be chosen.  Clothing?  “Do you know, Don Francesco, how small a part of the person the laws of morality compel you to cover?  There is not a dust-box in Pistoja but will give you a new suit to that measure every day.”  Food?  “Have you ever asked yourself,”