"Finch?" said Susanna. "Thank you very much. Ah, yes,"—with an air of recalling it,—"finch, to be sure. You are right," she smiled, "fringuello is prettier."
"What an adorable mouth," thought he. "The red of it—the curves it takes—and those incredible little white teeth, like snow shut in a rose."
"And this is a morning meet for pretty words, is it not?" he suggested.
"It might strike an unprejudiced observer as rather a pretty morning."
"Oh, I should be less reticent," said Susanna. "If the unprejudiced observer had his eyes open, would n't it strike him as a perfectly lovely morning?"
"We must not run the risk of spoiling it," Anthony cautioned her, diminishing his voice, "by praising it too warmly to its face."
She gave another light trill of laughter.
"Her laugh is like rainbow-tinted spray. It is a fountain-jet of musical notes, each note a cut gem," thought the infatuated fellow.
"I trust," he hazarded, "that you will not condemn me for a swaggerer, if I lay claim to share with you a singularity. The morning is a morning like another. God is prodigal of lovely mornings. But we two are singular in choosing to begin it at its sweeter end."
"Yes," Susanna assented, "that is a singularity—in England. But in Italy, or in the part of Italy where my habits were formed, it is one of our lazy customs. We like always to be abroad in time to enjoy what we call 'the hours immaculate,'—l'ure immacolae, in our dialect."
"The hours immaculate? It is an uncommonly fine description," approved
Anthony. "They will be a race of poets in your part of Italy?"