with other people, what is the use of being married at all? I said so to
Piero, and he answered, very insolently, "_Il n'y a point! Si on le
savait._" He sent for some more dreadful French books, Gyp's, and
Richepin's, and Gui de Maupassant's, and he lies about reading them all
day long when he isn't asleep. He is very often asleep in the daytime.
He apologizes when he is found out, but he yawns as he does so. You say
I should amuse him; but I _can't_ amuse him. He doesn't care for any
English news, and he is beginning to get irritable because I cannot talk
to him in Italian, and he declares my French detestable, and there is
always something dreadful happening. There has been such a terrible
scene in the village. Four of the Coombe-Bysset men, two blacksmiths, a
carpenter, and a laborer, have ducked Toniello in the village pond on
account of his attention to their women-kind; and Toniello, when he
staggered out of the weeds and the slime, drew his knife on them and
stabbed two very badly. Of course he has been taken up by the
constables, and the men he hurt moved to the county hospital. The
magistrates are furious and scandalized; and Piero!--Piero has nobody to
play billiards with him. When the magistrates interrogated him about
Toniello, as, of course, they were obliged to do, he got into a dreadful
passion because one of them said that it was just like a cowardly
Italian to carry a knife and make use of it. Piero absolutely _hissed_
at the solemn old gentleman who mumbled this. "And your people," he
cried, "are they so very courageous? Is it better to beat a man into a
jelly, or kick a woman with nailed boots, as your English mob does?
Where is there anything cowardly? He was one against four. In my country
there is not a night that goes without a _rissa_ of that sort; but
nobody takes any notice. The jealous persons are left to fight it out as
best they may. After all, it is the women's fault." And then he said
some things that really I cannot repeat; and it was a mercy that, as he
spoke in the most rapid and furious French, the old gentleman did not, I
think, understand a syllable. But they saw he was in a passion, and that
scandalized them, because, you know, English people always think that
you should keep your bad temper for your own people at home. Meantime,
of course, Toniello is in prison, and I am afraid they won't let us take
him out on bail, because he has hurt one of the blacksmiths dreadfully.
Aunt Carr