His nature was simple and self-complete.
Yet not so self-complete as that of Il Duro or Paolo. They had passed
through the foreign world and been quite untouched. Their souls were
static, it was the world that had flowed unstable by.
But John was more sensitive, he had come more into contact with his new
surroundings. He had attended night classes almost every evening, and
had been taught English like a child. He had loved the American free
school, the teachers, the work.
But he had suffered very much in America. With his curious,
over-sensitive, wincing laugh, he told us how the boys had followed him
and jeered at him, calling after him, 'You damn Dago, you damn Dago.'
They had stopped him and his friend in the street and taken away their
hats, and spat into them. So that at last he had gone mad. They were
youths and men who always tortured him, using bad language which
startled us very much as he repeated it, there on the little lawn under
the olive trees, above the perfect lake: English obscenities and abuse
so coarse and startling that we bit our lips, shocked almost into
laughter, whilst John, simple and natural, and somehow, for all his long
hair and dirty appearance, flower-like in soul, repeated to us these
things which may never be repeated in decent company.
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