ed
here. Did you want me, mother?"

"I always like to know where you are."

She passed her arm through his with a loving pressure, and looked out
of the window with him. The villa stood on the slope of the Janiculum,
close to the Corsini gardens.

"Do I run after you too much?" the mother asked presently, as if she
knew the answer. "Now that you are growing up, do I make you feel as if
you were still a little boy? You are nearly nineteen, you know! I
suppose I ought to treat you like a man."

Marcello laughed, and his hand slipped into hers with an almost childish
and nestling movement.

"You have made a man of me," he answered.

Had she? A shadow of doubt crossed her thoughtful face as she glanced at
his. He was so different from other young men of his age, so delicately
nurtured, so very gentle; there was the radiance of maidenly innocence
in his look, and she was afraid that he might be more like a girl than a
man almost grown.

"I have done my best," she said. "I hope I have done right."

He scarcely understood what she meant, and his expression did not
change.

"You could not do anything that was not right," he answered.

Perhaps such a being as Marcello would be an impossibility anywhere but
in Italy. Modern life tears privacy to tatters, and privacy is the veil
of the temple of home, within which every extreme of human development
is possible, good and bad. Take privacy away and all the strangely
compound fractions of humanity are soon reduced to a common
denomination. In Italy life has more privacy than anywhere else west of
Asia. The Englishman is fond of calling his home his castle, but it is a
thoroughfare, a market-place, a club, a hotel, a glass house, compared
with that of an average Italian. An Englishman goes home to escape
restraint: an Italian goes out. But the northern man, who lives much in
public, learns as a child to conceal what he feels, to be silent, to
wear an indifferent look; whereas the man of the south, who hides
nothing when the doors of his house are shut, can hide but little when
he meets his enemy in the way. He laughs when he is pleased, and scowls
when he is not, threatens when he is angry, and sheds tears when he is
hurt, with a simplicity that too often excites the contempt of men
accustomed to suffer or enjoy without moving a muscle.

Privacy favours the growth of individual types, differing widely from
each other; the destruction of it makes people very much alike.