Harry Lucenti. Run through the secrétaires of the great ladies and in every one of them you will find a volume of my poems, laid away with their love-letters. On the table in the drawing-room, the Bible and Kipling.
Leonardo. And a respectable husband at the head of the table.
Harry Lucenti. After dinner, under it.
Leonardo. I told you that joke yesterday and you found it in extremely bad taste.
Harry Lucenti. On the lips of a foreigner, it still continues to be so. It is not easy to forget that one is English, although one has been banished from England like Byron.
Leonardo. But you have not yet succeeded in banishing England?
Rinaldi. Byron, did you say? Byron never seemed immoral to me. I learned English when I was a schoolgirl, reading Byron.
Leonardo. Did you learn nothing but English reading Byron?
Rinaldi. We are not like Lady Seymour in Italy. It is impossible to shock us with banished poets.
Leonardo. The Countess is shock-proof. She has been cured of timidity.
Rinaldi. Rather I am convalescing. That is the reason I come here every winter.
Leonardo. Always alone.
Rinaldi. What is there to attract my husband?
Leonardo. Nothing; he has been cured already.
Etelvina. There will be great rejoicing in Suavia.
Duke. The court and the official element, not to speak of the people, idolized Prince Florencio. They could not forget that he was the son of the soldier, of the invincible liberator, your husband, venerated throughout Suavia.
