You never saw so strange and wild a thing!--the looks she threw at the Madonna and Child.

"Ah! Madam," I said to her--"the world was yours when you went down--but now it's theirs! Tame your insolence!" And I thought of hanging her here, at night, just outside, under the lamp against the wall of the shrine--and how one might come in the dark upon the fierce head with the snakes--and watch her gazing at the Christ.' Lucy shuddered and smiled.
'I'm glad she wasn't yours!' 'Why?
The peasants would soon have made a saint of her, and invented a legend to fit.

The snakes, for them, would have been the instruments of martyrdom--turned into a martyr's crown.

Italy and Catholicism absorb--assimilate--everything.

"_Santa Medusa!_"-- I assure you, she would be quite in order.' There was a pause.