Here, yet again, one detects a note of hesitation incompatible with perfect love. The very letter, however, which expresses the hesitations also contains directions for the forwarding of his furniture, which looks as though Byron already foresaw and accepted his fate. He was destined, in fact, to live with the household of the Guicciolis on the same terms on which he had previously lived with the household of the Segatis--engaging an apartment in their mansion, and paying a rent to the husband while making love to the wife--and to be what the Italians call a _cicisbeo_ and the English a tame cat. He admits, in various letters, that that is his position, and that he does not altogether like it. "I can't say," he tells Hobhouse, "that I don't feel the degradation;" but he nevertheless submits to it, describing himself to Hoppner as "drilling very hard to learn how to double a shawl," and giving the same correspondent a graphic picture of his first appearance in his new character: "The G.'s object appeared to be to parade her foreign lover as much as possible, and, faith, if she seemed to glory in the scandal, it was not for me to be ashamed of it. Nobody seemed surprised; all the women, on the contrary, were, as it were, delighted with the excellent example. The Vice-legate, and all the other Vices, were as polite as could be; and I, who had acted on the reserve, was fairly obliged to take the lady under my arm, and look as much like a Cicisbeo as I could on so short a notice, to say nothing of the embarrassment of a cocked hat and sword, much more formidable to me than it ever will be to the enemy." A picture in which no one's part is dignified, and no one's emotions are strained to a tense pitch, but everybody is happy and comfortable in an easy-going way. One gets the same impression from Byron's reply to Murray's suggestion that he should write "a volume of manners, &c. on Italy." There are many reasons, he says, why he does not care to touch that subject in print; but he assures Murray privately that the Italian morality, though widely different from the English, has nevertheless "its rules and its fitnesses and decorums." The women "exact fidelity from a lover as a debt of honour, while they pay the husband as a tradesman, that is not at all." At the same time, he adds, "the greatest outward respect is to be paid to the husbands, not only by the ladies, but by their _serventi_," so that "you would suppose them relations," and might imagine the _servente_ to be "one adopted into the family."