‘Am I excited, feverish? How ridiculous’ she thought, shrugging her shoulders and realizing for the first time that her lips were dry and her mouth parched. She took a draught of water, and sat looking at the untasted food, and thinking of quite other things. ‘How hungry I used to be once! How delicious everything tasted! How well I remember one day when Beppo took me! We walked--we could not afford carriages, not even a little carriage for a franc, to the gate--we walked on to the Appian Way. How beautiful it was! It was a spring morning. How the larks sang! how the little flowers gleamed in the grass, and the lizards ran in and out of the crevices of the tombs! and how the aqueducts marched away over the campagna towards the hills--those hills! How many things he told me! I put my arm through his, and we went on, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, looking at things and talking about them till we got past Casale Rotondo. There I grew impatient, and said it was time to have our lunch. We sat down by the roadside and ate. What had we? Each a hard-boiled egg and some of the household bread, without any butter; an orange or two, and a little bottle of red wine, with a tin cup from which to drink it. When it was done I was still hungry, and said so. He looked at me suddenly--I remember it well--with a cloud on his face. ‘“Ma che! why did you not speak?” he said. “I would have given you mine.” ‘How I laughed! I was a mere child, and I thought a man like Beppo, so strong and so big compared with me, must be much more in need of food than I. Then he told me, I remember, how people like me, who were growing still and to whom all the world was new, needed so much more nourishment and so much oftener than those who were quite grown up and established, and who were not surprised at anything any more--like him. I said, “How could being surprised make one hungry?” and I told him he was silly. He said, “Wait, my child. By the time you are ready to tell me that you understand what I say, I shall be dead; but I think, if you come to my grave and tell it to me there, I shall hear it.” Oh, how awfully sad were the things he sometimes said--all mixed with curious, funny observations at the same time! For the rest of our excursion he kept regretting every now and then that I had not had the other egg, and at the first little shop within the gate, as we returned, he bought me a _panino_ with butter. It was very good.’ Fulvia had forgotten in her reminiscences the meal that actually stood before her. She had scarcely tasted food, but rose suddenly from the table, and very soon went back to her charge.