Notwithstanding the old lady's irruptions into the kitchen the courses were a long time coming. Talk grew animated. Massimo chattered with the cousin; Signora Anna expatiated to Signora Clara on the delinquencies of the maid. "How are you getting on with your Gigione?" Antonio asked Gaspare; and his brother replied, abusing his chief as he had abused Marina. "Did you get my last letter?" Arduina demanded of Regina, under cover of the general noise. "Which?" "The one in which I asked information about the state of private benevolence in Mantua." "Oh, pray leave her in peace," interrupted Antonio testily. Regina thought of her old home, of the beautiful picture seen through the window of the great dining-parlour, the woods, the silver river sparkling in the summer sunshine--all lost! The actual picture of the woods, and the painted picture above the chimneypiece, a river scene by Baratta, showing the green banks of the Parma, and white boats against a violet sky--all vanished--vanished for ever! Seated on this back-breaking chair, among all these people who chattered of vulgar things, dismay again invaded her soul, the dismay felt by the condemned at the thought of association with his fellow-prisoners. Antonio paid her little attention; he was sucked into the current of his brothers' talk and had become a stranger to her. Again he made some jest at Arduina's expense; the maid looked at the ladies and laughed. Indeed, they all laughed. Why did they laugh? Was happiness making Antonio cruel? His brother Mario--a man no longer young, who seldom spoke, but always reddened when he heard his thought expressed by somebody else--detested, as they all knew, his wife's scribbling mania. So Antonio persisted in questioning his sister-in-law about her newspaper, _The Future of Woman_. "It has reached a circulation of three copies," said Massimo, "and it's clearly anxious to provoke quarrels, for it has printed a sonnet from a Calabrian paper without leave." "My goodness! how witty you are!" cried Arduina, laughing, but her whole face expressed a vague terror. Sor Mario, his eyes on his plate, grunted and munched like an angry bullock. There followed a perfect explosion of childish cruelty towards the poor creature, who, even to Regina, suggested a caricature. "I've never succeeded in discovering the office of her paper," said Claretta; "one ought to be able to go there if only to find the editor." "There are plenty of editors in the street," answered Arduina; "a girl like you could find one anywhere." "I don't see the sense of that!" cried Gaspare. "We never expect _you_ to see the sense of anything." "Come, show sense yourself!" interposed her husband, threatening her with his fork. "Are you in the Woman Movement, Regina?" some one asked.