Lydia gave him a look of amused surprise, but she did not mind the little man at all, nor did it for a moment occur to her that he might interpret her sudden confidential impulse according to any theory of nationalities.
“It is very hard,” she said, leaning back in her chair with a little sigh of relief, “when anyone looks you in the face, and keeps on asking questions, not to tell everything that you know.”
“You think so,” said Paolo. “Ah! Mees Joscelyn, it is that you are so true, what you call straightforwards in England; here one would take a pleasure in doing otherwise. In Italy, when it is imagined that you desire to know more than is necessary, that pleases to us to confuse you. Not to me,” he said, bethinking himself, and beating his breast lightly to indicate himself as an exception, “not to me, for I am also English: but to noi altri Italiani:” this little confusion of a double identity as English, yet one of _noi altri_, pleased Paolo; he laughed at his own cleverness with the frankest self-appreciation. “It pleases,” he said, “to put a too much inquirer wrong.”
“But when he looks you in the face,” said Lydia, amused and relieved, “how can you say anything but what it really is? There is a--person in England whom I know. He is not a gentleman, but he has the same name as Mr. Oliver. Mr. Oliver’s name is Isaac, is it not? but then they call him something else, and I don’t know what to think.”
“My amico, Oliver, pleases to Miss Joscelyn?” Paolo said.
“Pleases to----? I feel a great interest in him,” said Lydia. “He startled me so much with the sound of his name; and then he is like somebody I know. I cannot remember who it is--but there is some one; and then Mr. Bonamy asks me so many questions--I feel an interest. I do not think it very wise, if you have poor relations, to be ashamed of them--do you? And yet one does not like to betray another if there is any reason--” Lydia became so fragmentary in her utterances, that Paolo could not follow the broken thread of her thoughts.
“Ny-ce?” he said. “But my friend Oliver is very ny-ce--there is not a thought in him that is not ny-ce. I know,” said Paolo, with an ingratiating smile, “that word so well.”
“How nice of you to answer for him so!” cried Lydia, turning upon him with a sudden radiance of smiles. “It is delightful to meet with such a true friend.”