. Mercy me! Selling
her horses! And she isn't ashamed of it!... I suppose you'll sell your
clothes next, or perhaps your jewels."

"That's just what I want to do, Aunt Betsy."

"Holy Virgin! What are you saying, girl? Have you lost all sense of
decency? Sell your jewels! Goodness! Your ancestral jewels! You must
have grown utterly heartless as well as indifferent to propriety, or you
wouldn't dream of selling the treasures that have come down to you from
your own mother's breast, as one might say."

"My mother never set eyes on any of them, auntie, and if some of them
belonged to my grandmother, she must have been a good woman because she
was the mother of my father, and she would rather see me sell them all
than live in debt and disgrace."

"Go on! Go on with your English talk! Or perhaps it's American, is it?
You want to kill me, that's what it is! You will, too, and sooner than
you expect, and then you'll be sorry and ashamed ... Go away! Why do you
come to worry me? Isn't it enough ... Natalina! Nat-a-_lina_!"

Late that night Roma resumed her letter to David Rossi:

"DEAREST,--You are always the last person I speak to before I go
to bed, and if only my words could sail away over Monte Mario in
the darkness while I sleep, they would reach you on the wings of
the morning.

"You want to know all that is happening, and here goes again. The
tyrannies of military rule increase daily, and some of its
enormities are past belief. Military court sat all day yesterday
and polished off eighty-five poor victims. Ten of them got ten
years, twenty got five years, and about fifty got periods of one
month to twelve.

"Lawyer Napoleon F. was here this afternoon to say that he had
seen Bruno and begun work in his defence. Strangely enough he
finds a difficulty in a quarter from which it might least be
expected. Bruno himself is holding off in some unaccountable way
which gives Napoleon F. an idea that the poor soul is being got
at. Apparently--you will hardly credit it--he is talking
doubtfully about you, and asking incredible questions about his
wife. Lawyer Napoleon actually inquired if there was 'anything in
it,' and the thing struck me as so silly that I laughed out in his
face. It was very wrong of me not to be jealous, wasn't it? Being
a woman, I suppose I ought to have leapt at the idea, according to
all the natural laws of love.