And it was quite true, Paolo and Giovanni worked
twelve and fourteen hours a day at heavy laborious work that would have
broken an Englishman. And there was nothing at the end of it. Yet Paolo
was even happy so. This was the truth to him.
It was the mother who wanted things different. It was she who railed and
railed against the miserable life of the peasants. When we were going to
throw to the fowls a dry broken penny roll of white bread, Maria said,
with anger and shame and resentment in her voice: 'Give it to Marco, he
will eat it. It isn't too dry for him.'
White bread was a treat for them even now, when everybody eats bread.
And Maria Fiori hated it, that bread should be a treat to her children,
when it was the meanest food of all the rest of the world. She was in
opposition to this order. She did not want her sons to be peasants,
fixed and static as posts driven in the earth. She wanted them to be in
the great flux of life in the midst of all possibilities. So she at
length sent Paolo to America to the gold-mines. Meanwhile, she covered
the wall of her parlour with picture postcards, to bring the outer world
of cities and industries into her house.
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