“It is to be hoped so, since he will be your husband. But what do you mean in particular?”
“Why, you know he will call me Miss Jane; any one else would say Miss Hamilton.”
“That is an evil which is already at an end. No doubt for the future he will call you simply Jane, and speak of you a short time hence as la Contessa Gandolfi.”
“Then I wish he would not embrace you, Frank.” Frank laughed aloud.
“He would be hurt if I repulsed him. They all do it. He will soon see that in England it is not the custom, and then he will give it up—at least while there.”
“Another thing is, I do not like his wearing a large ring—though I own it is a handsome one—on his forefinger. We think that vulgar in England.”
“And it does not happen to be vulgar here; that is all about it, my dear Jane. I am afraid I cannot help you in that matter. But possibly in time you will succeed in bringing him round to your views; though I doubt your ever being able to break him of occasionally transferring that ring from his finger to his thumb whenever he is particularly anxious to remember something. When you see his palazzo in Rome, you will find that he possesses a beautiful portrait, by Vandyke, of an ancestor on his mother's side. That very ring is on the forefinger of the portrait. Emidio is the living image of that picture. And you can hardly blame a man for carrying out a likeness he has such reason to be proud of.”
“There is one other thing, Frank, which strikes me as odd. If he is sitting in the arm-chair when Mary or I come into the room (and you know we are not rich in arm-chairs here), he never gives either of us that chair, but fetches us another, and goes back to the arm-chair himself.”
“Jane, you are a little fool. Do you not know that in Italy, at least in the south, it is the height of ill-breeding to offer any one the chair you have just occupied yourself? A cool seat is always a desideratum in this climate, even though it may be a less luxurious one.”
“Shall I ever, do you think, be able to take back to England with me a husband with such a name as Emidio? What a pity he was not christened Paul, or Stephen, or even Anthony! But Emidio!” By this time we were both laughing—Frank at me, I at myself.