"'Of course, Oscar knows,' said Rebecca. 'He knows a good deal of it first hand.'
"'All right, I'll speak to Rosa,' I said.
"And I did, as I was telling you. I asked her who she was.
"'You have a good right to know,' she said, looking up to where a sentry's head and bayonet were sliding to and fro above the wall. 'I have meant to tell you, but I know very little. So little!'
"I said I left the matter in her hands entirely.
"The sentry stopped above us, presented arms, grounded, looked round, and then took a peep at us over the corner. A pair of lovers! His yellow, livid face cracked a smile as I caught his eye. For another second or so we grinned at each other, and then he put on his professional mask again, as though he had drawn down a vizor, shouldered his rifle and thumped along his little gangway. Rosa waited until he had passed the further turret and then turned to me.
"'It isn't easy to say it, though, after all,' she said. 'I was a little baby at Aunt Rebecca's, then a little girl and now a big girl. Before that, there was my mother who was dead. My father, dead too, a soldier like him'--she nodded towards the head and bayonet sliding backwards and forwards--'in Abyssinia, you know.'
"'Ah!' I said. 'Yes. But why don't you know your----' Rosa interrupted me.
"'That is just it,' she said. 'Now you come to it. I can't tell you all about it. I don't know the words. There are people in Genova who know. Uncle Oscar knows. He can tell you ... if you ask him.'
"Now it was perfectly obvious to me that my girl was not trying to hide some shameful secret from me, but rather that, her speech in our tongue running for the most part on the material details of life, she simply hadn't the words, as she put it, to relate a story in a higher key. I own I was interested, because it was a point which had struck me very much in the study of languages. You must have noticed how you can go along smoothly enough, learning vocabularies, verbs, adjectives, idioms, and so on, reading newspapers and books, filling in what you don't know with a guess or a skip, asking for things at the table, giving orders to a tailor or a barber; and when anybody asks you if you know that language, you say yes, and I suppose you are justified in a way. But just try to express the fundamental and secret things of your life, something that has happened, not in a book, but in your own soul, and see how ragged and beggarly your vocabulary is! The fact is, you don't often speak of these things in any language, let alone a foreign one. Rosa was never talkative. She could be silent without being sullen. Ours, you may say, was for the most part a silent courtship.