So you see, Buffo, you need not trouble about your clothes if
you want to appear English. You do not look in the least like a
cab-driver."

"Perhaps not; but I think it will be safer for me not to be an
Englishman. All this about your father's dressing-gown happened half a
century ago, and the letter and the article in the _Times_ must have done
some good because the English gentlemen who come to the teatrino do not
dress like that now. You are always beautifully dressed."

"Thank you very much, Buffo, but if that is more than merely one of your
Sicilian compliments, it only shows that I inherit my ideas about dress
from my mother rather than from my father."

"I think I had better be a Portuguese gentleman from Rio, a friend of
yours, over on a visit, and you shall be a Sicilian."

"We will be a couple of cavalieri erranti like Guido Santo and Argantino
on their travels. But I do not think it will quite do for me to be a
Sicilian. I cannot talk dialect and I cannot gesticulate. And then, am
I not too well dressed?"

"That will not matter; you shall be an aristocratic Sicilian, they are
often quite well dressed. And as for the dialect and the gesticulation,
it is now the fashion among the upper classes to speak Tuscan and not to
gesticulate. It is considered more--I cannot remember the word, I saw it
in the _Giornale di Sicilia_, it is an English word."

"Do you mean it is more chic?"

"It is not exactly that and chic is a French word. One moment, if you
please. It is--we say lo snobismo."

"I see. Very well; I will play the Sicilian snob, but I never saw one so
I shall have to do it extempore as Snug had to play the part of Lion."

"What is Snug? another American poet?

"He was a joiner and lived in Athens at the time when all the good things
happened. But his father, the author of his being, as we say, was an
English poet and cast him for the part of Lion in _Pyramus and Thisbe_."

"What is Thisbe? a wandering knight?"

"No. Thisbe was the lady loved by Pyramus and was acted by Flute the
bellows-mender. It's all in that poet who said what I told you when we
were making the Escape from Paris--you remember, about holding the mirror
up to nature."

"I wish I could read your English poets. I like everything English. The
Englishmen who come to the teatrino are always good and kind--tutti
bravi--I wish I were an Englishman--a real one I mean, like you."

Here were more compliments, so I rep