You can say so many things in a joking way, you can do so many
things in a joking way--especially in Northern countries, where it is
easy to joke unseen.
Meanwhile, with Ninetta, I discourse sweet nothings in my choicest idiom
which has grown rather rusty in England.
Italian is a flowery language whose rhetorical turns and phrases require
constant exercise to keep them in smooth working order. No; that is not
correct. It is not the vocabulary which deteriorates. Words are ever at
command. What one learns to forget in England is the simplicity to use
them; to utter, with an air of deep conviction, a string of what we
should call the merest platitudes. It sometimes takes your breath
away--the things you have to say because these folks are so enamoured of
rhetoric and will not be happy without it.
An English girl of her social standing--I lay stress upon the standing,
for it prescribes the conduct--an English girl would never listen to
such outpourings with this obvious air of approbation; maybe she would
ask where you had been drinking; in every case, your chances would be
seriously diminished. She prefers an impromptu frontal attack, a system
which is fatal to success in this country. The affair, here, must be a
siege. It must move onward by those gradual and inevitable steps
ordained of old in the unwritten code of love; no lingering by the
wayside, no premature haste. It must march to its end with the measured
stateliness of a quadrille. Passion, well-restrained passion, should be
written on every line of your countenance.
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