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.
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