These enticing wares the old man would tip out on the table. Mrs. Ashe
and Katy would select what they wanted, and then the process of
bargaining would begin, without which no sale is complete in Italy. The
old man would name an enormous price, five times as much as he hoped to
get. Katy would offer a very small one, considerably less than she
expected to give. The old man would dance with dismay, wring his hands,
assure them that he should die of hunger and all his family with him if
he took less than the price named; he would then come down half a franc
in his demand. So it would go on for five minutes, ten, sometimes for a
quarter of an hour, the old man's price gradually descending, and Katy's
terms very slowly going up, a cent or two at a time. Next the giantess
would mingle with the fray. She would bounce out of her kitchen, berate
the flower-vender, snatch up his flowers, declare that they smelt badly,
fling them down again, pouring out all the while a voluble tirade of
reproaches and revilings, and looking so enormous in her excitement that
Katy wondered that the old man dared to answer her at all. Finally,
there would be a sudden lull. The old man would shrug his shoulders, and
remarking that he and his wife and his aged grandmother must go without
bread that day since it was the Signora's will, take the money offered
and depart, leaving such a mass of flowers behind him that Katy would
begin to think that they had paid an unfair price for them and to feel a
little rueful, till she observed that the old man was absolutely dancing
downstairs with rapture over the good bargain he had made, and that
Maria was black with indignation over the extravagance of her ladies!
"The Americani are a nation of spend-thrifts," she would mutter to
herself, as she quickened the charcoal in her droll little range by
fanning it with a palm-leaf fan; "they squander money like water.
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