it is not good." "Not good ?" quoth I, and it was just so that that fool of a son of Balducci's must have protested in the story when he was told by his father that it was not good to look on women.

"Nay, now, but it is good to me." "And they say you are to be a priest," she added, which seemed to me a very foolish and inconsequent thing to add.
"Well, then?
And what of that ?" I asked.
She looked at me again with those timid eyes of hers.

"You should be at your studies," said she.
"I am," said I, and smiled.

"I am studying a new subject." "Madonnino, it is not a subject whose study makes good priests," she announced, and puzzled me again by the foolish inconsequence of her words.
Already, indeed, she began to disappoint me.

Saving my mother--whom I did not presume to judge at all, and who seemed a being altogether apart from what little humanity I had known until then--I had found that foolishness was as natural to women as its bleat to a sheep or its cackle to a goose; and in this opinion I had been warmly confirmed by Fra Gervasio.