"Madonnino, it is not a subject whose study makes good priests," she
announced, and puzzled me again by the foolish inconsequence of her words.

Already, indeed, she began to disappoint me. Saving my mother--whom I did
not presume to judge at all, and who seemed a being altogether apart from
what little humanity I had known until then--I had found that foolishness
was as natural to women as its bleat to a sheep or its cackle to a goose;
and in this opinion I had been warmly confirmed by Fra Gervasio. Now here
in Luisina I had imagined at first that I had discovered a phase of
womanhood unsuspected and exceptional. She was driving me to conclude,
however, that I had been mistaken, and that here was just a pretty husk
containing a very trivial spirit, whose companionship must prove a dull
affair when custom should have staled the first impression of her fresh
young beauty.

It is plain now that I did her an injustice, for there was about her words
none of the inconsequence I imagined. The fault was in myself and in the
profound ignorance of the ways of men and women which went hand in hand
with my deep but ineffectual learning in the ways of saints.

Our entertainment, however, was not destined to go further. For at the
moment in which I puzzled over her words and sought to attach to them some
intelligent meaning, there broke from behind us a scream that flung us
apart, as startled as if we had been conscious indeed of guilt.

We looked round to find that it had been uttered by my mother. Not ten
yards away she stood, a tall black figure against the grey background of
the lichened wall, with Giojoso in attendance and Rinolfo slinking behind
his father, leering.