"Eat a bit more," she said. "You’re tired and worked up like. Yes!" she added. "I was like you, Angelica; and you can see what it did for me. I was a nice-looking girl in those days. There was more than one young fellow who wanted to marry me; but I wouldn’t have any of them. I thought they weren’t good enough. I was a great one for reading books, and my head was full of nonsense. "Then I met your father. He was a fine-looking man, Angelica. You can’t remember him when he was well. He was a big, handsome man, a barber. My folks were terrible set against it, and I don’t wonder. There he was, an I-talian, and twenty years older than me, and nothing in the world but a barber, and a kind of a Socialist. He was always talking about killing the rich people. I think he’d have been willing enough to do something like that with his own hands, he used to get so worked up. He was a queer man, Angelica. And yet, for all his talk about killing, and the awful things he’d say against religion and churches, why, he wasn’t a bad man. He was generous. He’d share his last penny with a friend. He often did; we’d have to go without ourselves if one of his precious ‘comrades’ was in a tight corner. He was a smart man, too. He spent all his spare time in the free library, reading; but that never gets you anywhere, Angelica. He had no knack for earning money, and he never could save. What’s more, he wasn’t fond of work. He’d rather read or talk. He could talk all night, I do believe. "It nearly broke my mother’s heart when I went off with Angelo. My father, he said he’d never speak to me again, nor have my name spoken in the house, on account of my marrying an atheist, you see. But I didn’t seem to care. There was something about him----” She was silent for a time, recalling her startling foreign lover, with his caressing voice, his mandolin-playing, his anti-clerical passions, and the brisk, pretty young girl who had been herself. "I was terrible headstrong. I wouldn’t listen to any one. I _would_ have him, and I did. Well, I was punished for my folly and wickedness, I can tell you. It’s always the way when you won’t listen to your own dear parents and those that are wiser than yourself. We never got on. From the very day we were married--you don’t know what it’s like, Angelica. We were always owing money. He wouldn’t hand what he made over to me, for me to manage. I never knew where we stood. All of a sudden he’d say, ‘No more money!’ and there we’d be, without a penny. We had to live in such a mean, poor way that I lost my health. One time we were turned out of our rooms, out into the street, bag and baggage, with all the neighbors looking on.