a
staircase which had no banisters. And you could die there without anybody
knowing how bad you were and coming to help you. Only the previous day
the corpse of an old man had been found lying on the plaster in a lonely
room. Starvation must have killed him quite a week previously, yet he
would still have been stretched there if the odour of his remains had not
attracted the attention of neighbours.

"If one only had something to eat things wouldn't be so bad!" continued
Giacinta. "But it's dreadful when there's a baby to suckle and one gets
no food, for after a while one has no milk. This little fellow wants his
titty and gets angry with me because I can't give him any. But it isn't
my fault. He has sucked me till the blood came, and all I can do is to
cry."

As she spoke tears welled into her poor dim eyes. But all at once she
flew into a tantrum with Tito, who was still wallowing in the grass like
an animal instead of rising by way of civility towards those fine people,
who would surely leave her some alms. "Eh! Tito, you lazy fellow, can't
you get up when people come to see you?" she called.

After some pretence of not hearing, the young fellow at last rose with an
air of great ill-humour; and Pierre, feeling interested in him, tried to
draw him out as he had done with the father and uncle upstairs. But Tito
only returned curt answers, as if both bored and suspicious. Since there
was no work to be had, said he, the only thing was to sleep. It was of no
use to get angry; that wouldn't alter matters. So the best was to live as
one could without increasing one's worry. As for socialists--well, yes,
perhaps there were a few, but he didn't know any. And his weary,
indifferent manner made it quite clear that, if his father was for the
Pope and his uncle for the Republic, he himself was for nothing at all.
In this Pierre divined the end of a nation, or rather the slumber of a
nation in which democracy has not yet awakened. However, as the priest
continued, asking Tito his age, what school he had attended, and in what
district he had been born, the young man suddenly cut the questions short
by pointing with one finger to his breast and saying gravely, "_Io son'
Romano di Roma_."

And, indeed, did not that answer everything? "I am a Roman of Rome."
Pierre smiled sadly and spoke no further. Never had he more fully
realised the pride of that race, the long-descending inheritance of glory
which was so heavy to bear. The so