“You are a ninny to stand there in doubt--to think of doing anything but what I say,” Carolina went on. “See the clothes I have bought you. Do you know what I paid in Genova for that dress, that hat, those shoes? Well, I paid sixty _lire_, not counting the buttons and lining. But what can one expect from a silly girl? I buy you fine clothes, I bring you to America in second class like a signora. I offer you a signore for a husband, with a beautiful house to live in. But you, the goose, say you like better to dress in rags, to have a beggar for a husband, to starve, to live in the streets; for into the streets you go, remember, if you continue to play the fool.” Carolina was no stranger to the lotus that gives languor of conscience toward means when the end cries for attainment. Moreover, her present mood was bordering desperation. The mishap that laid her low for so many months had worn off her veneer of placidity, and she returned to America much the same galvanic Italian that she was the day she first set foot in Castle Garden--the Carolina of pre-churchly days, who flared up and left her brother’s roof after a quarrel over watermelons, and put herself under holy orders. Unluckily for her peace of mind, while she lay a prisoner in the mountains waiting for broken bones to knit, she had received advices regularly concerning affairs at Casa Di Bello--especially affairs matrimonial. The letters were in the fine hand of the public writer of Mulberry, but the message they bore came from Carolina’s faithful ally, Angelica. In her zeal to serve, the cook only added wormwood to her mistress’s cup of gall, for her missives always told darkly of some would-be wife threatening the castle. The last letter had spoken with maddening vagueness of a crisis surely at hand, and Carolina’s instinct told her that the crisis was Juno. For this reason she had sailed a week before the day given her brother as the one of her intended departure. How could she remain supine in Genoa when Casa Di Bello stood menaced with an invasion that meant ruin to her fond designs? With Juno driven back, Carolina saw the battle won, for she had no doubt at all of her power to mould the will of a lovelorn maid. She was guilefully confident that there would arise no balk to her plans through Marianna’s refusal to be wived by Di Bello, for, with a subtilty deep set in her nature, she had counted from the outset, other arguments failing, that she should persuade the damsel in the end by the homely device of threatening to turn her adrift. Wherefore, having begun the assault, and observing that this line of tactics had melted Marianna to a thoughtful silence, she followed it up while they crossed the ferry from Hoboken, seated in a cab, their luggage on top. As they rolled over the cobbles of the lower East Side and the warm breath of May entered the window, Carolina gave her picture of a girl homeless and starving in the big city many a convincing touch.