"Did
you ask him whom _he_ eats with? Did he say I was ugly? Did you ask
him whether his _ragazza_ was prettier?" (She meant a Danish lady,
a married woman, with whom she had frequently met K.B. in the street.)
She said to me yesterday: "There is one thing I can do, sir, that you
cannot. I can carry 200 pounds' weight on my head. I can carry two
_conchas_, or, if you like to try me, all that wood lying there."
She has the proud bearing of the Romans.
Read with Filomena for an hour and a half. She can now spell words with
three letters fairly well. This language has such a sweet ring that her
spelling is like music. And to see the innocent reverence with which she
says _g-r-a, gra_,--it is what a poet might envy me. And then the
earnest, enquiring glance she gives me at the end of every line. It is
marvellous to see this complete absorption of a grown-up person in the
study of _a-b, ab_, and yet at the same time there is something
almost great in this ravenous thirst for knowledge, combined with
incredulity of all tradition. It is a model such as this that the poets
should have had for their naive characters. In Goethe's _Roman Elegies_,
the Roman woman's figure is very inconspicuous; she is not drawn as a
genuine woman of the people, she is not naive. He knew a Faustina, but
one feels that he afterwards slipped a German model into her place.
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