The Signor Pietro, queer old horse, began to laugh and neigh at the
child, with strange, rancorous envy. The child twisted its face to cry.
The Signora caught it away, dancing back a few yards from her
old husband.

'I am a stranger,' I said to her across the distance. 'He is afraid of a
stranger.'

'No, no,' she cried back, her eyes flaring up. 'It is the man. He always
cries at the men.'

She advanced again, laughing and roused, with the child in her arms. Her
husband stood as if overcast, obliterated. She and I and the baby, in
the sunshine, laughed a moment. Then I heard the neighing, forced laugh
of the old man. He would not be left out. He seemed to force himself
forward. He was bitter, acrid with chagrin and obliteration, struggling
as if to assert his own existence. He was nullified.

The woman also was uncomfortable. I could see she wanted to go away with
the child, to enjoy him alone, with palpitating, pained enjoyment. It
was her brother's boy. And the old padrone was as if nullified by her
ecstasy over the baby. He held his chin, gloomy, fretful, unimportant.

He was annulled. I was startled when I realized it. It was as though his
reality were not attested till he had a child. It was as if his _raison
d'etre_ had been to have a son. And he had no children. Therefore he had
no _raison d'etre_. He was nothing, a shadow that vanishes into nothing.
And he was ashamed, consumed by his own nothingness.

I was startled. This, then, is the secret of Italy's attraction for us,