Nino entered to clear away the tea-things. The house was entirely run by him and his family in true Italian fashion, for his sister was housemaid and his stepmother, the second that his father had provided him with, was cook, and she was abhorred by the boy with a genial intensity, for there would be no patrimony left when his father had finished with this brisk succession of wives, each of whom feathered her own nest before she died. “Well, Nino, and how’s Mamma?” said Colin. Nino, who had been audibly exchanging compliments with his stepmother in the kitchen, drew his eyebrows inward and down, and muttered something which with certain prudent expurgations indicated a pious wish about desiccated and barren stoats. Colin laughed. “Well, you wouldn’t like her to be a fruitful stoat,” he observed. “Scusi, but I would,” said Nino, “for surely she would die in childbirth, and there would be one coffin for the two.” “I thought I heard you kissing in the kitchen,” observed Colin. “I would sooner kiss the gridiron,” said Nino. “Well, go and kiss the gridiron then if you prefer it. And take the tea-things away, Nino. And when you’ve finished kissing the gridiron come back. I want you.” The Southern smile broke through. Colin could always make Nino smile, even when the stepmother was in the picture. “Sis-signor,” said Nino. “I will kiss the stoat and the gridiron.” “We shoot stoats in England,” said Colin, “and hang their corpses upon trees.” “Eh, she’d look nice on the pine there,” said Nino. “But, Dio, the stink, when the scirocco blew!” Nino departed with the tea-things to kiss his stepmother or the gridiron or anything he chose. That was the true spirit in which to live here; you never bothered your head as to what you were proposing to do; you just did exactly as you liked whenever an amusing opportunity suggested itself. And yet it was a wonderful place in which to make plans, thought Colin. You lay on the beach after your bathe, and without effort your brain seethed with ideas. The sun seemed to liquefy the contents of its cells, and the secret juices, scarcely known to yourself, oozed out in the clear broth of thought. And fruitful too, was the night, when the wind whispered in the pine, and the great furry-bodied bats with wings of stretched black parchment wove silent circles in the air....