"What is the stupid fellow to do?" I inquired, "the play was made for
him."

"He must escape too, Pietro will help him because they will become
friends; besides, any one can escape from a stage prison, especially if
the knives are not taken away from the convicts. And then he can do
whatever the author likes.

"But it is always so in life," he continued, with a sigh, "we must not be
discontented because the best we can get is not the best we can imagine.
I am still young, but not too young to have kn--- Let us not talk about
that. What did you think of the play last night?"

I replied that it was a fine play.

He agreed, saying it was "strepitosamente bello." It opened with a state
of things easily comprehensible and of great interest. There were no
tedious explanatory speeches, but plenty of action leading naturally to a
catastrophe which was at once seen to be inevitable, though no one could
have predicted precisely that. And the conclusion sent the audience away
feeling that something tremendous had happened, and that the state of
things existing at the beginning could never exist again.

"That is how a play should be," said Micio.

I took a leaf out of Giovanni's book and patted him on the back.

"Bravo, Micio, bravo! No one has yet said anything like that at supper.
This is the second time this morning that you have expressed my thoughts
for me. We must get your sister to let you sit up with us one of these
evenings. You would keep us straight."

"They know all about it," he replied, "especially Giovanni, he knows
everything. But they don't say it because they like to go on talking."

"There! now you have done it a third time. You appear to me to know all
about it too. How did you find it all out? They did not teach it you at
school, did they?"

"I do not remember that any one ever taught it me," he replied; "I seem
to have known it always. It cannot be otherwise. It is like eating
cheese with maccaroni."

"We seldom eat maccaroni in England," said I, in defence, "and when we do
we usually eat sugar with it; perhaps that is why we are so slow."

This was a mistake because I wanted him to talk more about the theatre,
and there is something quicksilverish in Micio's temperament; having got
on the maccaroni he did not care to return to art.

"What do you eat in England if you do not eat maccaroni? Do you eat
chocolate?"

Which reintroduced the original question, and when we had atten