nary room, looking down
from a height upon a town below--a room in which she would live
altogether, with her books and her favourite objects and the
companionship of her favourite ideas and plans, all of which were to be
realized and executed in the course of time. She fancied herself gazing
down from the wide window upon what was almost all hers, upon the
dwellings of people who lived upon her land, who pastured her flocks and
drove her cattle, living, moving, and having being as integral animate
parts of her great inheritance; children of men and women whose fathers'
fathers had laboured in old days that she might have and enjoy the
fruits of so much toil, who had given much and from whom had often been
taken even that which they had not been bound fairly to give; who had
received nothing in return for generations of blood and bone worn out,
dried up, and consumed to dust in the service of the great house of
Serra. They had a right to her, as she had a right to the lands on
which they lived. There was much talk of rights, Veronica thought,
nowadays, and those who had none were privileged to speak the loudest
and to be heard first. But those who, having right on their side, were
blinded and smitten dumb by the enormous despotism of their self-styled
betters--by the glare and noise of blatant power in possession--they
were the ones who really had rights, and if she could give any of them a
single hundredth part of what was their due, she should be glad that she
had lived. Wealth, she thought, should not be an accumulation, but a
distribution, of goods. Charity should no longer mean alms, nor should
poverty be pauperism. In the young, whole-hearted simplicity of her
desire to do good, it seemed likely that she might soon be a specimen of
the strangest of all modern anomalies--the princely socialist. It was
certainly in her power to try almost any experiment which suggested
itself, and on a scale which might ultimately prove something to herself
and others.

It was not that she meant to study political economy, or socialism, nor
to give the name of an experiment to anything she did. She had been
struck by the practical necessity for doing something, when Don Teodoro
had first written to her about the condition of the people in Muro, and
her own observations made on her farms in the Falernian district--one
of the richest corners of vine land in all Italy--had convinced her that
some sort of action was urgently necessary. A