Alone By Norman Douglas













































































 -  How debased
an expression, nowadays. What a text for a sermon on the mishaps of good
words and good things - Page 23
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How Debased An Expression, Nowadays.

What a text for a sermon on the mishaps of good words and good things.

How all the glad warmth and innocence have faded out of the phrase. What a change has crept over us....

Glancing through a glass window not far from the hotel, I was fortunate enough to espy a young girl seated in a sewing shop. She is decidedly pretty and not altogether unaware of the fact, though still a child. We have entered upon an elaborate, classical flirtation. With all the artfulness of her years she is using me to practise on, as a dummy, for future occasions when she shall have grown a little bigger and more admired; she has already picked up one or two good notions. I pretend to be unaware of this fact. I treat her as if she were grown up, and profess to feel that she has really cast a charm - a state of affairs which, if true, would greatly amuse her. And so she has, up to a point. Impossible not to sense the joy which radiates from her smile and person. That is all, so far. It is an orthodox entertainment, merely a joke. God knows what might happen, under given circumstances. Some of a man's most terrible experiences - volcanic cataclysms that ravaged the landscape and left a trail of bitter ashes in their rear - were begun as a joke. 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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