e descended the stairs.

Down below Giacinta was still sitting on the broken box with her infant
across her lap, and a few steps away Pierina stood in front of Dario,
watching him with an enchanted air whilst he finished his cigarette.
Tito, lying low in the grass like an animal on the watch for prey, did
not for a moment cease to gaze at them.

"Ah, signora!" resumed the woman, in her resigned, doleful voice, "the
place is hardly inhabitable, as you must have seen. The only good thing
is that one gets plenty of room. But there are draughts enough to kill
me, and I'm always so afraid of the children falling down some of the
holes."

Thereupon she related a story of a woman who had lost her life through
mistaking a window for a door one evening and falling headlong into the
street. Then, too, a little girl had broken both arms by tumbling from a
staircase which had no banisters. And you could die there without anybody
knowing how bad you were and coming to help you. Only the previous day
the corpse of an old man had been found lying on the plaster in a lonely
room. Starvation must have killed him quite a week previously, yet he
would still have been stretched there if the odour of his remains had not
attracted the attention of neighbours.

"If one only had something to eat things wouldn't be so bad!" continued
Giacinta. "But it's dreadful when there's a baby to suckle and one gets
no food, for after a while one has no milk. This little fellow wants his
titty and gets angry with me because I can't give him any. But it isn't
my fault. He has sucked me till the blood came, and all I can do is to
cry."

As she spoke tears welled into her poor dim eyes. But all at once she
flew into a tantrum with Tito, who was still wallowing in the grass like
an animal instead of rising by way of civility towards those fine people,
who would surely leave her some alms. "Eh! Tito, you lazy fellow, can't
you get up when people come to see you?" she called.

After some pretence of not hearing, the young fellow at last rose with an
air of great ill-humour; and Pierre, feeling interested in him, tried to
draw him out as he had done with the father and uncle upstairs. But Tito
only returned curt answers, as if both bored and suspicious. Since there
was no work to be had, said he, the only thing was to sleep. It was of no
use to get angry; that wouldn't alter matters. So the best was to live as
one could without increasing one's worry. As fo