THE NINTH MAN
the town gone mad? Everywhere I saw change, even as great as in my cousin Gemma, a meek and pious girl. A long-eyed girl she was, downcast, too timid to look at one straight, given to shy, sidelong glances, a slim, honey-colored girl. I liked to tease her, to see the soft pink mount in her bashful cheeks. Now as I passed by her house I saw her at the window, herself, but changed—soft yet, like a hazy sky in summer, but beckoning, inviting, and glancing now at Guido and now at young Leoncavello, playing them more skilfully with her white and desirable innocence than any courtezan, while my aunt watched the game.
As I told these things to Mazzaleone I felt as ashamed as one who sees his mother indecorous in some public place. "Give them life," said he; "they snap at it and gulp it down like a hungry dog; and since they wish amusement they shall have what they wish. Everything they wish they shall have—I could envy them their gusto," he added.
And so he set about giving a festa of great magnificence, and asked all the nobles within the town of San Moglio; and he
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