not then aware that the shorter way to Siena from Padua was by Arezzo.

I was now to learn that it was very possible, in a country where all
classes save one were poor, to do away with the standard which obtains
all over the civilised world, and to measure men, not by what they have,
but by what they are. For a man to be without money where others have
much is to be without foothold--the goal for any fribble's shot of
contempt. It is as if he stood naked in a well-dressed assembly. But
where all are naked alike, no man need to be ashamed; and where all
pockets are empty, it is not singular to be without them; your wit
becomes your stock in the funds, and your right hand your ready money.
So, I say, I found it to be; but I believe that wit and ready hand were
alike Virginia's. I may have caught at the theory--hers was the
practice. Virginia's opinion was that work for hire was either done by
habit or on compulsion. An ox, said she, draws the plough, because his
race have always drawn it; a peasant works afield, because he is part of
the soil's economy. He comes from it, he manures it, tills it, feeds off
it, returns to it again. It is his cradle, his meat, his shroud, his
grave. But in cities the case is altered. Here man is predatory,
solitary, prowling, not gregarious. Here, for a man of wits, his fellows
are the field which he tills. He is the best husbandman who can tickle
the soil to his easiest profit, who can grow the finest crop at the
least pains, and get for little what is worth much. What, she would say,
do we need which the city will not give us for the reaching out of a
hand? Shelter? A hundred houses stand empty week by week. Take any one
of them; they are there to be chosen. Clothing? "Do you know, Don
Francesco, how small a part of the person the laws of morality compel
you to cover? There is not a dust-box in Pistoja but will give you a new
suit to that measure every day." Food? "Have you ever asked yourself,"
she would exclaim, "how many pounds of bread we throw to the dogs in the