These, however, are minor questions—pertinent only as connecting themselves with the more serious side of her talent. We may rejoice in such a specimen of it as is offered by the too brief series of episodes of “The Romance of the Maiden.” These things, dealing mainly with the small miseries of small folk, have a palpable truth, and it is striking that, to put the matter simply, Madame Serao is at her best almost in direct proportion as her characters are poor. By poor I mean literally the reverse of rich; for directly they _are_ rich and begin, as the phrase is, to keep their carriage, her taste totters and lapses, her style approximates at moments to that of the ladies who do the fashions and the letters from the watering-places in the society papers. She has acutely and she renders with excellent breadth the sense of benighted lives, of small sordid troubles, of the general unhappy youthful (on the part of her own sex at least) and the general more or less starved plebeian consciousness. The degree to which it testifies to all this is one of the great beauties of “Il Paese di Cuccagna,” even if the moral of that dire picture be simply that in respect to the gaming-passion, the madness of “numbers,” no walk of life at Naples is too high or too low to be ravaged. Beautiful, in “Il Romanzo della Fanciulla,” are the exhibitions of grinding girl-life in the big telegraph office and in the State normal school. The gem of “Gli Amanti” is the tiny tale of “Vicenzella,” a masterpiece in twenty small pages—the vision of what three or four afternoon hours could contain for a slip of a creature of the Naples waterside, a poor girl who picks up a living by the cookery and sale, on the edge of a parapet, of various rank dismembered polyps of the southern sea, and who is from stage to stage despoiled of the pence she patiently pockets for them by the successive small emissaries of her artful, absent lover, constantly faithless, occupied, not too far off, in regaling a lady of his temporary preference, and proportionately clamorous for fresh remittances. The moment and the picture are but a scrap, yet they are as large as life.