Crocodile on the Sandbank (Amelia Peabody, #1)

by Elizabeth Peters

He expressed his chagrin to his compatriot in his native tongue, and included in his tirade several personal comments on my appearance and manner. I let him go on for some time and then interrupted with a comment on his manners. I speak Italian, and understand it, quite well. After that Piero and I got on admirably.

The level of sass with patience is delightful.

“How do you know that she is English?” I inquired. Piero did not reply in words; he went through an extraordinary series of grimaces to indicate a certainty so profound it requires no evidence. His eyes rolled, his hands flew about, his shoulders rose and fell. What else should the lady be but English.

I can perfectly picture his response, the true way someone from a cultural that speaks with their hands responds.

The accents were those of a gentleman. The sentiments were not.

“But I know you, madam! I have met your kind too often —the rampageous British female at her clumsiest and most arrogant. Ye gods! The breed covers the earth like mosquitoes, and is as maddening. The depths of the pyramids, the heights of the Himalayas—no spot on earth is safe from you!”

“And you, sir, are the lordly British male at his loudest and most bad-mannered. If the English gentlewoman is covering the earth, it is in the hope of counteracting some of the mischief her lord and master has perpetrated. Swaggering, loud, certain of his own superiority…”

“I believe you fought a gallant fight with the bed sheets and the netting,” Evelyn said. “Real objects and those seen in dreams blend into one another—”

A fallen colossus is more pitiable than a felled weakling.

“Being dead is the ultimate of unhealthiness, I suppose.

Stepping forward, he dropped to his knees before Evelyn. I thought that the long-expected collapse was about to occur. It was with an indescribable thrill of emotion that I realized he had grasped Evelyn’s limp hand in his and was pressing his lips against it. I did not need to hear his words to know he had risen to heights I never really expected a man to reach. “You are the noblest girl I have ever met,” he cried, raising his eyes to Evelyn’s astonished face. “The truest, the most courageous, the loveliest…. I don’t know many men who would have the strength to do what you have just done! But my dearest, sweetest girl….” he rose, still holding her hand and looking down at her with tender reproach. “Do you think so little of me that you suppose I would not understand your tragic story? Evelyn, you might have trusted me!”

Finally!

“How theatrical these young persons are! Thank God for our sober, middle-aged common sense, eh, Peabody?”

So sober indeed