seat by the ravine.

"Ciao, ciao, ciao!"

She thought of the young peasants going off to be soldiers, and singing
that song to keep their hearts up. Some day, perhaps, Gaspare would have
to go. He was the eldest of his family, and had brothers. Maurice sang
that song like a Sicilian lad. She thought, she began to think, that even
the timbre of his voice was Sicilian. There was the warm, and yet
plaintive, sometimes almost whining sound in it that she had often heard
coming up from the vineyards and the olive groves. Why was she always
comparing him with the peasants? He was not of their rank. She had met
many Sicilians of the nobility in Palermo--princes, senators, young men
of fashion, who gambled and danced and drove in the Giardino Inglese.
Maurice did not remind her at all of them. No, it was of the Sicilian
peasants that he reminded her, and yet he was a gentleman. She wondered
what Maurice's grandmother had been like. She was long since dead.
Maurice had never seen her. Yet how alive she, and perhaps brothers of
hers, and their children, were in him, how almost miraculously alive!
Things that had doubtless stirred in them--instincts, desires,
repugnances, joys--were stirring in him, dominating his English
inheritance. It was like a new birth in the sun of Sicily, and she was
assisting at it. Very, very strange it was. And strange, too, it was to
be so near to one so different from herself, to be joined to him by the
greatest of all links, the link that is forged by the free will of a man
and a woman. Again, in thought, she went back to her comparison of things
in him with things in the peasants of Sicily. She remembered that she had
once heard a brilliant man, not a Sicilian, say of them, "With all their
faults, and they are many, every Sicilian, even though he wear the long
cap and live in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman." So the peasant, if
there were peasant in Maurice, could never disturb, never offend her. And
she loved the primitive man in him and in all men who had it. There was a
good deal that was primitive in her. She never called herself democrat,
socialist, radical, never christened herself with any name to describe
her mental leanings, but she knew that, for a well-born woman--and she
was that, child of an old English family of pure blood and high
traditions--she was remarkably indifferent to rank, its claims, its
pride. She felt absolutely "in her bones," as she would have said, th