“But to sing in your English comic opera I must speak English ever so much better than I do now,” pursued Lisa, “and for that I am working, oh, so hard. I learn grammar. I read story-books; ‘Bootle’s Baby;’ the ‘Vicar of Wakefield.’ Oh, how I have laughed and cried over that Vicar and his troubles—and Olivia—Olivia who was so deceived—and so happy at last.”
“Happy, with a scoundrel,” exclaimed Vansittart.
“Ah, but she loved him. One does not mind how much scoundrel if one loves a man.”
“A bad principle, Signorina. It is better to love a good man ever so little than a scoundrel ever so much.”
“No, no, no. It is the loving much that means happiness,” argued Lisa, and then she expatiated upon her English studies. “La Zia and I go to the theatre when there is no performance at Coveny Gardeny. We sit in the pit, where the people are kind, and make room for us because we are foreigners. Signor Zinco says there is no better way of learning English than in listening to the actors in good plays. Oh, how I listen! In three months from this day people will take me for an Englishwoman,” she said finally.
“Never, Lisa, never,” he said, laughingly contemplative of the sparkling olive face, the great dark eyes with golden lights in them, the careless arrangement of the coarse black hair, the supple figure in its plain black gown, and the essentially foreign air which years of residence in England would hardly obliterate. “Never, Si’ora! Your every glance is eloquent of Venice and her sister isles. It seems almost a crime to keep you captive in this sunless city of ours.”
“Oh, but I adore London,” she exclaimed, “and your London is not sunless. See how the sun is shining on the river this afternoon; not as it shines on the lagunes in May, I grant you, but it is a very pretty piccolo sole.”
“And la Zia,” asked Vansittart; “she is well, I hope?”
“She is more than well. She is getting fat. Oh, so fat. She is as happy as the day is long. She loves your London, the King’s Road most of all. At night there are barrows, fish, vegetables, everything. She can do her marketing by lamplight, and the streets are almost as full and as gay as the Merceria. La Zia was never so happy in all her life as she is in London. She never had so much to eat.”
They were near Saltero’s Mansion by this time.