I shall be in society, and you--why, you will not even be out of the University." She said this with the contempt which Marcello's extreme youth deserved.
"I am not going to the University." "Then you will be a boy all your life.

I always tell you so.

Unless you do what other people do, you will never grow up at all.

You ought to be among men by this time, instead of everlastingly at home, clinging to your mother's skirts!" A bright flush rose in Marcello's cheeks.

He felt that he wanted to box her ears, and for an instant he wished himself small again that he might do it, though he remembered what a terrible fighter Aurora had been when she was a little girl, and had preserved a vivid recollection of her well-aimed slaps.
"Don't talk about my mother in that way," he said angrily.
"I'm not talking of her at all.