'Come and live with us for a summer on one of our big farms near Mantua--and you shall see.

My land brings me just double what it brought my father!--and our contadini are twice as well off.
There! that's in our starving Italy--in the north of course, mind you!' He threw himself back, smoking furiously.
'Optimist!' said a woman's voice.
They looked round to see the Marchesa Fazzoleni upon them.

She stood smiling, cigarette in hand, a tall woman, still young--though she was the mother of five robust children.

Her closely-fitting black dress somehow resembled a riding-habit; her grey gauntletted gloves drawn to the elbow, her Amazon's hat with its plume, the alertness and grace of the whole attitude, the brilliancy of her clear black eye--all these carried with them the same suggestions of open-air life, of health of body and mind--of a joyous, noble, and powerful personality.
'Look well at her,' the Ambassador had said to Lucy as they stepped into the garden after luncheon.

'She is one of the mothers of the new Italy.
She is doing things here--things for the future--that in England it would take twenty women to do.