'Pronti, dottore!' cried the barman, setting the coffee and the two scallop-shaped pastries on the marble counter.

'How does money come into it?' asked the younger woman, glancing down at the plate before her. Her appearance was softer and less formidable than her sister's, her hair longer and lighter, her flesh paler and plumper.

'Whose money?' Orestina enquired pointedly.

Zen sipped the scalding coffee, served in a cup preheated by boiling run-off from the espresso machine.

'Your mother's/ he said.

'Aha!'

'Let me explain to you her way of thinking…'

'We know that only too well,' returned the younger woman. 'She thinks that Sabatino and Gesualdo are thugs, criminals, gangsters, drug dealers, and Heaven knows what else!'

'Oh certainly, Signorina Filomena! That goes without saying. But where your mother and I differ is that she doesn't believe that they are really in love with you. Not only have you chosen to bestow your beauty, brains and breeding on these worthless individuals — I paraphrase your mother's rhetoric here — but, even worse, they are only diverting themselves with you, and will move on to new conquests as soon as they have got what they want.'

'That's a horrible thing to say!' cried Filomena, her green eyes watering. 'Sabatino is always very sweet and respectful to me and he really cares about my feelings.

Mamma has no right to say that he doesn't love me. She's just jealous, that's all.'

'Gesualdo's only crime is that his parents were poor and lived in the wrong part of town,' her sister protested.

'It's simply shameful of mamma to condemn him for that.

He's the finest, truest, kindest, straightest man I've ever met, and worth any number of the snobby, snotty, spoilt brats she would like to marry us off to!'

Aurelio Zen drained his coffee and reached towards his pocket, then paused, frowning. He shook his fingers as though to relieve a cramp.