“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?