“For country, Italy; as a city, Paris. London is too foggy, too straggling.”
“Then you will enjoy a winter in India.”
“Yes, it is three years since I was there.” He pronounced his w’s as v’s, the only way in which you could have discovered that he was a foreigner.
“How well you speak English!” I remarked.
“Then you have detected that I am not an Englishman,” he said, with evident surprise.
“Yes.”
“Of what country do you think I am a native?”
“Asia—possibly India, or Persia,” I ventured.
“Why?—why not a Spaniard, an Italian, a South American, or a Greek?”
“Yes, you might be a Greek, or an Armenian, but all the same I think you were born further East.” I had not been nineteen years in India for nothing!