"Antonio, hush!" she said, not looking at him. "What do you expect? Life is like that--stupid and vulgar. The most horrible things are revealed by the gossip of silly women, and whole dramas are played on the high road in the course of an evening walk. It wouldn't do if that happened in a novel! The author would be accused of vulgarity, if not of nonsense. In real life, on the contrary, see what happens. The grand lady goes to a garret in Via San Lorenzo to discover the cause of her unhappiness; the superior woman comes out into the street to----" "Regina, have done! have done!" cried Antonio. "You reason too much and too coldly for you to believe what you are saying. No, it is not true! You do not believe it! Tell me you don't believe it!" And he tried to take her arm, but this time it was she who repulsed him. "Let me alone! That is what you men are! If I had been another woman, another sort of wife, I should have lain in wait for you at home, like a tigress in her lair. I should have made a scene, one of those scenes called _strong_, which are so pleasing at the theatre or in a novel. Whereas, I have spoken to you quite quietly. I repeat a thing which every one is saying, and I ask nothing better than that we should laugh at it together. But you--you begin with noisy words, '_aren't you ashamed_,' and '_scandal-mongering_,' and '_the great lady_.' Yes, certainly, I am a lady; more of a lady than those other women. It is just that I don't value conventionalities; that is the calamity." "Then would you prefer me to be silent? Is that it? Don't torment me like this, Regina! In my opinion it would have been better to have this scene at home. Well, your jealousy is the last straw----" Regina laughed. Her laugh was genuine but strident, hoarse, as if proceeding out of rusty iron. "My dear, you are raving! Jealousy! Come, not that!" "Why did you say you believed it?" "Did I say so? Surely not." "I tell you, you did say it." "I said I believed people believed it." "I don't think so," he protested. "Well, 'people' are always malicious." "That, at any rate, is true. People are malicious. You see, our position has changed; we are living comfortably in spite of our slender income, so at once people hatch a scandal. The very excuse you make that you have become a speculator just now, when you might have been one all along----" "That is absurd!" interrupted Antonio. "I was a bachelor before, and had more money than I knew what to do with. Besides, you are supposed to have money of your own. No one knows that I began speculating by a mere chance----" "What has all this to do with it? The world has no need to know our affairs. Chance!" she repeated, her face darkening as she remembered the "_chance_" in which she had so childishly believed, while instinct had warned her of fiction, fiction clever but thin, like the invention in a novelette.