"
Really, Mae was for the moment, at a quick glance, the ideal peasant.
Her hands lay in her lap, her face was toward the sea, and her attitude
and features were all full of that glow of existence that peasant
portraits possess. She lived and moved and had her being as part of
a great, warm, live picture. If the lady in brown had not passed so
quickly, however, she would have seen a something in Mae's face that
spoiled her for a peasant, an earnestness in her admiration, a sharp
intensity in her joy, that was very different from the languid content
of a Southern Italian. Her movements were rather like those of the
Northern squirrel, which climbs nimbly and frisks briskly, than like the
sinuous, serpentine motions of the Southern creatures of the soil. We
are, after all, born where we belong, as a rule, and the rest of us soon
belong where we are born.
After a time the donkey pattered along towards a little patch of
houses on the shore. They had already passed a half dozen of similar
settlements.
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