'Was not a Maremmano mariner as good as a cowkeeper in Savoy?' said Musa, with continuous contempt.
'It was the antagonism of races; our people came from Glarus, and were of a Teuton stock,' said Sanctis; and then remembered that he was talking in an unknown tongue to his companion. He added quickly, 'I am very sorry that we let her live so. But to me she was only a vague name, she belonged to such a distant time; even my grandfather Joachim I never saw.'
She was mute. She was angered with his intrusion on her solitude, and she was resentful of that long neglect under which Joconda had lived through so hard a life to pass away in so lonely a death.
If he had been a shepherd, or a herdsman, or a rude sailor, he might have awakened her sympathies; but there was about him the atmosphere, as it were, of another world than hers: a sort of look of ease, of culture, of success, of all things which were beyond her comprehension, yet which alienated her.
He could not prevail on her to listen, nor on himself to give up so easily what the dead woman's letter had entreated her brethren
