and thumped along his little gangway. Rosa waited until he had
passed the further turret and then turned to me.

"'It isn't easy to say it, though, after all,' she said. 'I was a little
baby at Aunt Rebecca's, then a little girl and now a big girl. Before
that, there was my mother who was dead. My father, dead too, a soldier
like him'--she nodded towards the head and bayonet sliding backwards and
forwards--'in Abyssinia, you know.'

"'Ah!' I said. 'Yes. But why don't you know your----' Rosa interrupted
me.

"'That is just it,' she said. 'Now you come to it. I can't tell you all
about it. I don't know the words. There are people in Genova who know.
Uncle Oscar knows. He can tell you ... if you ask him.'

"Now it was perfectly obvious to me that my girl was not trying to hide
some shameful secret from me, but rather that, her speech in our tongue
running for the most part on the material details of life, she simply
hadn't the words, as she put it, to relate a story in a higher key. I
own I was interested, because it was a point which had struck me very
much in the study of languages. You must have noticed how you can go
along smoothly enough, learning vocabularies, verbs, adjectives, idioms,
and so on, reading newspapers and books, filling in what you don't know
with a guess or a skip, asking for things at the table, giving orders to
a tailor or a barber; and when anybody asks you if you know that
language, you say yes, and I suppose you are justified in a way. But
just try to express the fundamental and secret things of your life,
something that has happened, not in a book, but in your own soul, and
see how ragged and beggarly your vocabulary is! The fact is, you don't
often speak of these things in any language, let alone a foreign one.
Rosa was never talkative. She could be silent without being sullen.
Ours, you may say, was for the most part a silent courtship.

"Well, I did what she suggested. By good chance Oscar Hank's ship, the
_Prinz Karl_, was due in from New York at the time, and when I saw her
two big yellow funnels and top-heavy passenger decks blocking the view
of the Principe, I went over. Mr. Hank, _Signore_ Hank, was a man who
had seen the best of his life before he married Rebecca. He was a tall,
spare-ribbed man with high shoulders and thin hair brushed across an
ivory patch of bald scalp. His face was strong enough, but worn. He had
prominent eyes and sharp cheek-bones accentuated by the hollows i