Where wisdom, full-fledged, might have halted, trembling, she swept resolutely onward.

Before her stood this friar, this teacher and interpreter, this man of holy life who was accounted profoundly learned in the Divinities; and he told her that she had done an evil thing.

Yet out of the tiny pittance of her knowledge and her little intellectual sight--which was no better than a blindness--must she confidently tell him that he was at fault.
Argument was impossible between him and her.

Thus much I saw, and I feared an explosion of the wrath of which I perceived in him the signs.
But he quelled it.

Yet his voice rumbled thunderously upon his next words.
"It matters something that Gino Falcone should not starve," he said.
"It matters more that my son should not be damned," she answered him, and with that answer left him weapon-less, for against the armour of a crassness so dense and one-ideaed there are no weapons that can prevail.
"Listen," she said, and her eyes, raised for a moment, comprehended both of us in their glance.