Nor does this blank behaviour seem savage to those who are used to
nothing else. Yet it is somewhat more inhuman to refuse an answer to the
beggar's remark than to leave a shop without "Good morning." When
complaint is made of the modern social manner--that it has no merit but
what is negative, and that it is apt even to abstain from courtesy with
more lack of grace than the abstinence absolutely requires--the habit of
manner towards beggars is probably not so much as thought of. To the
simply human eye, however, the prevalent manner towards beggars is a
striking thing; it is significant of so much.

Obviously it is not easy to reply to begging except by the intelligible
act of giving. We have not the ingenuous simplicity that marks the caste
answering more or less to that of Vere de Vere, in Italy, for example. An
elderly Italian lady on her slow way from her own ancient ancestral
_palazzo_ to the village, and accustomed to meet, empty-handed, a certain
number of beggars, answers them by a retort which would be, literally
translated, "Excuse me, dear; I, too, am a poor devil," and the last word
she naturally puts into the feminine.

Moreover, the sentence is spoken in all the familiarity of the local
dialect--a dialect that puts any two people at once upon equal terms as
nothing else can do it. Would it were possible to present the phrase to
English readers in all its own helpless good-humour. The excellent woman
who uses it is practising no eccentricity thereby, and raises no smile.
It is only in another climate, and amid other manners, that one cannot
recall it without a smile. To a mind having a lively sense of contrast
it is not a little pleasant to imagine an elderly lady of corresponding
station in England replying so to importunities for alms; albeit we have
nothing answering to the good fellowship of a broad patois used currently
by rich and poor, and yet slightly grotesque in the case of all