the mannered voice, and with the affected accent which all foreign and exotic names—particularly those that had a Latin flavouring—inspired in him.
Arrived at “Pothillippo’s,” Frank, who even at this time did all things with the most lavish and lordly extravagance, and who tipped generously at every opportunity, would be welcomed obsequiously by the proprietor and the waiters, and then would order with an air of the most refined and sensual discrimination from his favourite waiter, a suave and fawning servitor named Nino. There were other waiters just as good as Nino, but Frank expressed an overwhelming preference for him above all others because, he said, Nino had the same face as one of the saints in a painting by Giotto, and because he professed to find all of the ancient, grave and exquisite rhythm of the ancient Tuscan nobility composed in the one figure of this waiter.
“But have you noticed the way he uses his hands while talking?” Frank would say in a tone of high impassioned earnestness.—“Did you notice that last gesture? It is the same gesture that you find in the figure of the disciple Thomas in Leonardo’s painting of’The Last Supper.’It really is, you know…. Christ!” he would cry, in his high, strange, and rather womanish tone. “The centuries of art, of living, of culture—the terrific knowledge all these people have—the kind of thing you’ll never find in people in this country, the kind of thing that no amount of college education or books can give you—all expressed in a single gesture of the hands of this Italian waiter…. The whole thing’s quite astonishing, it really is, you know.”
The real reason, however, that Frank preferred Nino to all the other waiters in “Pothillippo’s” establishment was that he liked the sound of the word “Nino” and pronounced it beautifully.
“Nino!” Frank would cry, in a high, strange, and rather womanish voice—“Nino!”
“Sì, signor,” Nino would breathe unctuously, and would then stand in an attitude of heavy and prayerful adoration, awaiting the young lord’s next commands.
“Nino,” Frank would then go on in the tone and manner of a sensuous and weary old-world sophisticate. “Quel vin avez-vous?… Quel vin—rouge—du—très—bon. Vous—comprenez?” said Frank, using up in one speech most of his French words, but giving a wonderful sense of linguistic mastery and complete eloquence in two languages.
“Mais si, signer!” Nino would answer immediately, skilfully buttering Frank
