"No, it isn't. And my village, you know, when I was small boy, that
was in the mountains, an hour quick train from Naples. Cold in the
winter, hot in the summer--"

"As cold as England?" said Alvina.

"He--and colder. The wolves come down. You could hear them crying in
the night, in the frost--"

"How terrifying--!" said Alvina.

"And they will kill the dogs! Always they kill the dogs. You know,
they hate dogs, wolves do." He made a queer noise, to show how
wolves hate dogs. Alvina understood, and laughed.

"So should I, if I was a wolf," she said.

"Yes--eh?" His eyes gleamed on her for a moment.

"Ah but, the poor dogs! You find them bitten--carried away among the
trees or the stones, hard to find them, poor things, the next day."

"How frightened they must be--!" said Alvina.

"Frightened--hu!" he made sudden gesticulations and ejaculations,
which added volumes to his few words.

"And did you like it, your village?" she said.

He put his head on one side in deprecation.

"No," he said, "because, you see--he, there is nothing to do--no
money--work--work--work--no life--you see nothing. When I was a
small boy my father, he died, and my mother comes with me to Naples.
Then I go with the little boats on the sea--fishing, carrying
people--" He flourished his hand as if to make her understand all
the things that must be wordless. He smiled at her--but there was a
faint, poignant sadness and remoteness in him, a beauty of old
fatality, and ultimate indifference to fate.

"And were you very poor?"

"Poor?--why yes! Nothing. Rags--no shoes--bread, little fish from
the sea--shell-fish--"

His hands flickered, his eyes rested on her with a profound look of
knowledge. And it seemed, in spite of all, one state was very much
the same to him as another, poverty was as much life as affluence.
Only he had a sort of jealous idea that it was humiliating to be
poor, and so, for vanity's sake, he would have possessions. The
countless generations of civilization behind him had left him an
instinct of the world's meaninglessness. Only his little modern
education made money and independence an _idee fixe_. Old instinct
told him the world was nothing. But modern education, so shallow,
was much more efficacious than instinct. It drove him to make a show
of himself to the world. Alvina watching him, as if hypnotized, saw
his old beauty, formed through civilization after civilization; and
at the same time she saw his mode