And suddenly, at the sound of my voice, the child was overwhelmed by shyness. She covered her face with her forearm as though she were warding off a blow. Then, after a second or two, she peeped out at me cautiously from under her elbow. Her face had become quite red. I called again. It was once too often. She turned and ran away, ran back to her family, who were sitting, twenty yards down the beach, in the precarious and shifting oasis of shadow cast by a large striped umbrella. I saw her hurl herself into the arms of a large placid mother in white muslin. Then, having successfully abolished my existence by burying her face in the comfortable bosom, she slid down again from her mother’s knee and went on playing with her little sister, serenely, as though the untoward incident had never occurred. Mournfully, from somewhere in the distance, came the long, suspended cry of the vendor of doughnuts. “Bomboloni.” Two young American marchesas in purple bathing gowns went past, talking together on one note, in indefatigable even voices. “... and he has such a lovely mentality,” I heard one of them saying. “But what I like,” said the other, who seemed to have acquired more completely the Latin habit of mind, “what I like is his teeth.” A middle-aged man, with the large stomach that comes of too much _pasta_, and a very thin little boy of twelve now entered my field of vision, all wet and shiny from the sea. The hot sand burned their feet and they went hopping across the scorching beach with an agility which it was good to see. But the soles of mad Concetta’s feet were made of hornier stuff. Barefooted, she walked down every morning from the mountains, carrying her basket of fruit over one arm and holding in the other hand a long staff. She hawked her wares along the beach, she went the round of the villas until her basket was empty. Then she walked back again, across the plain and up into the hills. Turning from the fat man and the little thin boy I saw her standing before me. She was dressed in a stained and tattered old dress. Her grey hair escaped in wisps from under a wide straw hat. Her old face was eager, thin and sharp; the wrinkled skin was like brown parchment stretched over the bones. Leaning on her staff, she looked at me for a little in silence. “So you’re the drowned foreigner,” she said at last. “If he were drowned, how could he be alive?” asked the doctor. The young giant found this exquisitely witty; he laughed profoundly, out of the depths of his huge chest. “Go away now, Concetta,” the doctor went on. “He must be kept quiet. We can’t have you treating him to one of your discourses.” Concetta paid no attention to him. She was used to this sort of thing.