They now found themselves face to face with the librarian, and Mr. Waters made a gesture of waiving himself in Colville's favour.
"No, no!" said the latter; "you had better ask. I am going to put this gentleman through rather an extended course of sprouts."
The librarian smiled with the helplessness of a foreigner, who knows his interlocutor's English, but not the meaning of it.
"Oh, I merely wanted to ask," said Mr. Waters, addressing the librarian, and explaining to Colville, "whether you had received that book on Savonarola yet. The German one."
"I shall see," said the librarian, and he went upon a quest that kept him some minutes.
"You're not thinking of taking Savonarola's life, I suppose?" suggested Colville.
"Oh no. Villari's book has covered the whole ground for ever, it seems to me. It's a wonderful book. You've read it?"
"Yes. It's a thing that makes you feel that, after all, the Italians have only to make a real effort in any direction, and they go ahead of everybody else. What biography of the last twenty years can compare with it?"
"You're right, sir—you're right," cried the old man enthusiastically. "They're a gifted race, a people of genius."
"I wish for their own sakes they'd give their minds a little to generalship," said Colville, pressed by the facts to hedge somewhat. "They did get so badly smashed in their last war, poor fellows."