“Not to buy your strawberries, which ruin every one’s skin, but to pay for a basket to please you.”
He extracts from his purse a note for a hundred francs, giving it to the beautiful treasurer, Margherita Savelli, who gives a cry of joy.
“O Flaminia, how kind this sham knave Provana is!”
“Most kind,” Flaminia replied, and she gives him her hand, which he touches with his lips gallantly.
Other people crowd round the stall, and Provana talks softly with Maria Guasco. She replies without looking at him, as if wrapt in her own deep, dominating thoughts, which are marked from eyebrow to eyebrow.
“Are you, too, interested in foundlings, Donna Maria?” he asked.
“Well, will you give me one of those red roses, only one?”
The request is made with seeming disingenuousness, but she understood that the man was waiting for the reply attentively. The woman was silent, and smelled her roses.
“I will pay whatever price you like--for the foundlings,” he murmured suggestively.
“Why do you value it so?” she asked, looking at him.
“Because it is yours; because it has been in your hands, because you have put it near your face, and have placed it to your lips.”
The voice is lower and the expression more ardent. The woman had never heard the like from him before. She looked at him with melancholy curiosity, but free from anger.
“Maria, give me the rose,” and he attempted to take it gently from the bunch.
Maria drew back and looked at him, protecting her flowers.
“For whom, then, do you wish to keep the roses, Donna Maria?” he asked, half bitterly and ironically.
“I don’t know; I don’t know,” she replied, trembling.
“If you don’t give me one, to whom will you, Donna Maria?”
She let the roses fall and scatter on the table, all her face was disturbed with sudden pallor. Gianni Provana quietly took a rose which she had not given him--which he had gained in spite of her; but, instead of placing it in his buttonhole, he placed it with care in the inside pocket of his coat.
A short, strident laugh was Maria’s only reply.
“How badly you laugh, Donna Maria!” he exclaimed, a little irritated.
“Come from behind the stall and let us take a walk together?” he asked.
His tone remained simple and disingenuous, but within there was a dull agitation, which the man restrained with difficulty.