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 reproaches and revilings, and looking so enormous in her excitement that Katy wondered that the old man dared to answer her at all. Finally, there would be a sudden lull. The old man would shrug his shoulders, and remarking that he and his wife and his aged grandmother must go without bread that day since it was the Signora's will, take the money offered and depart, leaving such a mass of flowers behind him that Katy would begin to think that they had paid an unfair price for them and to feel a little rueful, till she observed that the old man was absolutely dancing downstairs with rapture over the good bargain he had made, and that Maria was black with indignation over the extravagance of her ladies!

"The Americani are a nation of spend-thrifts," she would mutter to herself, as she quickened the charcoal in her droll little range by fanning it with a palm-leaf fan; "they squander money like water. Well, all the better for us Italians!" with a shrug of her shoulders.