“Billiards perhaps, and filthy cigars, and that greenish bitter—anisette, I think they call it—are cheap enough, perhaps; but these are all luxuries I can’t share in.”
Here was the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand that presaged the first connubial hurricane. A married friend—one of much experience and long-suffering—had warned me of this, saying, “Don’t fancy you’ll escape, old fellow; but do the way the Ministry do about Turkey—put the evil day off; diplomatise, promise, cajole, threaten a bit if needs be, but postpone;” and, strong with these precepts, I negotiated, as the phrase is, and, with a dash of reckless liberality that I tremble at now as I record it, I said, “You’ve only to say where—nothing but where to, and I’ll take you—up the Rhine, down the Danube, Egypt, the Cataracts———”
“I don’t want to go so far,” said she, dryly. “Italy will do.”
This was a stunner. I hoped the impossible would have stopped her, but she caught at the practicable, and foiled me.
“There’s only one objection,” said I, musing.
“And what may that be? Not money, I hope.”
“Heaven forbid—no. It’s the language. We get on here tolerably well, for the waiter speaks broken English; but in Italy, dearest, English is unknown.”
“Let us learn Italian, then. My aunt Groves said I had a remarkable talent for languages.”
I groaned inwardly at this, for the same aunt Groves had vouched for a sum of seventeen hundred and odd pounds as her niece’s fortune, but which was so beautifully “tied up,” as they called it, that neither Chancellor nor Master were ever equal to the task of untying it.
“Of course, dearest, let us learn Italian;” and I thought how I’d crush a junior counsel some day with a smashing bit of Dante.