se ladies
of gentle birth, friends from childhood, had to work like servants in
the fields, the vineyard, and the house; they had to take lodgers, and
wait on them; and worse than all this, to listen to words of insult and
contumely, and that from others besides the clergy, who, under the
Papal rule, were absolute masters in the town. For at that time few
paid any tribute of respect to the wives of the men who had made
sacrifices for their country, or, like them, looked forward to the
triumph of freedom, enlightenment, and justice. Now, indeed, in the end
the old woman had won! But what did victory mean? Tears for her
slighted affection, her rejected counsels, her ruined property; and she
would rise and curse the sons who had deceived and plundered her, till
a single glance from her elder daughter-in-law drove her back to the
chimney corner, where she used to sit and pass her time in silent
torpor, while this mood was upon her. Then she would sally out, and if
she met her grandsons, in whom she sorrowfully noticed the same keen
glance under the low brows, which she had first loved and afterwards
learned to fear in her own sons, she would draw them to her with a
torrent of angry words. She would warn them against their father's
example, and inveigh against the people, as a mere rabble, not worth
the sacrifice of a farthing, to say nothing of the loss of fortune,
family, and freedom; and she would rail at her sons, the fathers of
these boys, as the handsomest, but most ungrateful and impracticable
children whom any mother in the town had brought to manhood. And
pushing them angrily from her, the unhappy woman would address the boys
in accents of half-distracted appeal: "Do try and have more sense, you
good-for-nothing scoundrels, you, instead of standing there and
grinning at me. Don't be like those silly mothers of yours in there,
who are bewitched by my sons' madness. But, God knows, there are mad
folks on all sides of me." Then she would thrust the lads from her,
weeping, and bury herself in her retreat. As time went on, neither she
nor the boys stood on ceremony with one another. They laughed at her,
when she was in one of her fits of despondency, and she threw stones at
them; and at last it came to this, that if they merely saw her sitting
alone, they would call out, "Grandmamma, haven't you gone mad again?"
and then the expected volley of stones would follow.

But why did the old woman hardly dare to utter a syllabl