Carmella Commands
rington car took Tommaso and Mrs. Alibrio back to Doty Street.
Little Italy’s gossip is neither quicker nor harsher nor more daring than any other gossip in the world. It is merely just as much so. By supper time Carmella, coming home from an afternoon with a friend, knew from half a dozen eager informers that Mrs. Alibrio had been taken by her father as interpreter on a busi- ness deal. In vacation, too, when she was not in school. When, in fact, she was just around the corner.
Mrs. Alibrio had been taken as interpreter on a business deal. Carmella’s head rang with the words. Mrs. Alibrio! Interpreter! Mrs. Alibrio! Good God-and-all!
The girl thought furiously. For a few minutes she was dazed. Then, sitting back in the Morris chair and closing her eyes, she thought it through. Aha! Her father was disciplining her. He had sensed her pride in his work and in her occasional part of it. So he had deliberately cut her out of it. Ah! He was a shrewd man, her father. But she would show him.
Carefully she was out of the house when Tommaso came home that afternoon. But, following him in after a few minutes, she went directly to him.
“Are you tired tonight, dad?” she asked in Italian.
“A little,” he answered. “But not so much as some days. Why, piccola ragazza?”
“Because, papa, I so much want to go to the movies
[148]
