armella, meanwhile, had come running to the yellow cottage on Doty Street, a dingy cottage with a ten-foot depth of front yard and room for grapes at the back. In marked contrast to the square-front tenements on both sides and across the street. Carmella reveled in the feeling of glorious superiority a one-family house gave her.
Before she had turned the corner she had known what to prepare for. A strange man in a gray suit, with baggy trousers, with some kind of a book in one hand and a pencil in the other, and her mother shrieking maledictions which the gray-clad man would not understand, because they were in Italian. It was exactly so.
The gray-clad young man, speaking English; Maria Coletta, Carmella’s mother, highly angry and shouting Italian. With neighbors and neighbors’ children gathered around the yellow gate. When Carmella arrived the argument had reached high-C. She rushed to her mother’s side and faced the stranger.
“Say,” she cried in English, “cut the comedy and
[29]
