Now, Mrs. Jimmie is a very Madonna of calmness, but at that she ignited.  She told him that Tiffany had been six months matching those stones, and that not in all his shop—­not in the whole of Italy—­could he find a duplicate.  At that another search took place, and I, just to make things pleasant, started for the American ambassador’s. (I had risen a peg from Cook’s!) Such pleading!  Such begging!  Two of the clerks actually wept—­Italian tears.  When lo! a shout of triumph, and from a remote corner of the shop, quite forty feet from us, in a place where we had not been, under a big vase, they found that ring!  If it had had the wings of a swallow it could not have flown there.  If it had had the legs of a centipede it could not have crawled there.  The proprietor was radiant in his unctuous satisfaction.  “It had rolled there!” Rolled!  That ring!  It had no more chance of rolling than a loaded die!  We all sniffed, and sniffed publicly.  Mrs. Jimmie, I regret to say, was weak enough to buy the ring she had ordered for Jimmie in spite of this occurrence.  But I think I don’t blame her.  I am weak myself about buying things.  But that is a sample of Italian honesty, and in a shop which would rank with our very best in New York or Chicago.  Heaven help Italy!

Italian politeness is very cheap, very thin-skinned, and, like the French, only for the surface.  They pretend to trust you with their whole shop; they shower you with polite attentions; you are the Great and Only while you are buying.  But I am of the opinion that you are shadowed by a whole army of spies if you owe a cent, and that for lack of plenty of suspicion and prompt action to recover I am sure that neither the Italians nor the French ever lost a sou.

We went into the best tortoise-shell shop in all Naples to buy one dozen shell hair-pins, but such was the misery we experienced at leaving any of the treasures we encountered that we bought three hundred dollars’ worth before we left, and of course did not have enough money to pay for them.  So we said to lay the things aside for us, and we would draw some money at our banker’s, and pay for them when we came to fetch them.

Not for the world, declared this Judas Iscariot, this Benedict Arnold of an Italian Jew!  We must take the things with us.  Were we not Americans, and by Americans did he not live?  Behold, he would take the articles with his own hands to our carriage.  And he did, despite our protests.  But the villain drew on us through our banker before we were out of bed the next morning!  I felt like a horse-thief.

However, I confess to a weakness for the overwhelmingly polite attentions one receives from Italian and French shopkeepers.  One gets none of it in Germany, and in America I am always under the deepest obligations if the haughty “sales-ladies” and “sales-gentlemen” will wait on the men and women who wish to buy.  I am accustomed to the ignominy of being ignored, and to the insult of impudence if I protest; but why, oh, why, do politeness and honesty so seldom go together?