My Own Italian Was Of That Date; But, Though I
Began By Using It, I Found Myself So Often Helped For A Forgotten
Meaning That I Became Subtly Demoralized And Fell Luxuriously Into The
Habit Of Speaking English Like A Native Of Rome.
Yet tacitly, secretly
perhaps, there may have been many people who were taking up Italian as
zealously as many more were taking up antiquity.
One day in the Piazza
di Spagna, in a modest little violet of a tea-room, which was venturing
to open in the face of the old-established and densely thronged parterre
opposite, I noted from my Roman version of a buttered muffin a tall,
young Scandinavian girl, clad in complete corduroy, gray in color to the
very cap surmounting her bandeaux of dark-red hair. She looked like some
of those athletic-minded young women of Ibsen's plays, and the pile of
books on the table beside her tea suggested a student character. When
she had finished her tea she put these books back into a leather bag,
which they filled to a rigid repletion, and, after a few laconic phrases
with the tea-girl, she went out like going off the stage. Her powerful
demeanor somehow implied severe studies; but the tea-girl - a massive,
confident, confiding Roman - said, No, she was studying Italian, and all
those books related to the language, for which she had a passion. She
was a Swede; and here the student being exhausted as a topic, and my own
nationality being ascertained, What steps, the tea-girl asked, should
one take if one wished to go to New York in order to secure a place as
cashier in a restaurant?
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