I determined to try a new tack and surprise her. I had a few shreds of Italian left from a time when I had studied the poets as a refuge from the desert dulness of my college course, and now having, in a pause, recalled the lines, I dropped, as though quite naturally, Dante's immortal wail: 'Nessun maggior dolore Che recordarci del tempo felice Nella miseria.' I felt sure that this would at least impress her with my culture, while if by any chance she knew the lines, which I did not apprehend, it would impress her all the more and might prove a step toward a reconciliation. For a moment she said nothing, then she asked quietly, "How does the rest of it go?" She had me there, for I did not know the rest of the quotation. "'E ciò sa il tuo dottore,'" she said with a cut of her eye, and a liquid tone that satisfied me I had, as the saying runs, "stepped from the frying-pan into the fire." She glanced at me with a smile in her eyes that reminded me, through I know not what subtle influence, of Spring, but as I was unresponsive she could not tell whether I was in earnest or was jesting. I relapsed into silence and took my soup, feeling that I was getting decidedly the worst of it, when I heard her murmuring so softly as almost to appear speaking to herself: "'The time has come,' the Walrus said, 'To talk of other things-- Of ships and shoes and sealing-wax, And cabbages and Kings.'" I glanced at her to find her eyes downcast, but a beguiling little dimple was flickering near the corners of her mouth and her long lashes caught me all anew. My heart gave a leap. It happened that I knew my Alice much better than my Dante, so when she said, "You can talk, can't you?" I answered quietly, and quite as if it were natural to speak in verse: "'In my youth,' said his father, 'I took to the Law, And argued each case with my wife, And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw Has lasted the rest of my life.'" She gave a little subdued gurgle of laughter as she took up the next verse: "'You are old,' said the youth. 'One would hardly suppose That your eye was as steady as ever, Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose-- What made you so awfully clever?'" I hoped that she was embarrassed when I found that she had taken my napkin by mistake, and she was undoubtedly so when she discovered that she had it. "I beg your pardon," she said as she handed me hers. I bowed. With that, seeing my chance, I turned and spoke to the lady on my other side, with whom I was soon in an animated discussion, but my attention was not so engrossed by her that I did not get secret enjoyment out of the fact when I discovered that the elderly man on the other side of Miss Leigh was as deaf as a post and that she had to repeat every word that she said to him.