Severn looked faintly offended. "I can assure you, John, I followed the notes as written."

"I meant Haydn, not you. And yet we do know what he will do next. I dedicate this evening to the bubbling out of stupidities. Play that movement again and I will know what he is going to do next. If I could read those hieroglyphics I would see it all planned, not at all childlike." In comic gloom, "It justifies or vindicates or something Dr Clark's John Calvin. All planned from start to end and I am fool enough to talk of childish unpredictability." He chuckled. "Still, it is a good impersonation of childlikeness. Not like old Willy Wordsworth."

Severn did not attack the second movement. He folded his hands and looked up in reproach. "These days you laugh at everything."

"Not at everything, Sabrina. I do not laugh at our comic writers."

"I think," Gulielmi said, "you must plunge into our Roman dialect at once. It is not like the Tuscan. Its very make and sound is different. And it has never had the terrible dantesco vision imposed on it. It does not have that sense of high responsibility that for half a millennium the tongue of Florence has had to bear. The Roman tongue is coarse and rough and full of the Rabelaisian. There are, for instance, hundreds of words to describe, to describe, well, the -"

"Ah," John said, "I see we are on the marge of bawdry. Can you stomach some of that commodity, Dr Clark? Severn can drown his ears in Haydn."

"I have a friend," Gulielmi said, "a poet, scholar, actor, a fine-looking man, a fine man altogether, who did an admirable thing and then, in a sort of pudic remorse, destroyed it. His copy, that is. I had and have my own. A sonnet based on the Roman cant terms for the ah male pudendum. A long sonnet."

"I do not think, with respect," John said, "you may speak of a long sonnet."

"Come, you will have met sonnets with codas. Petrarch wrote them. Your, our, Milton wrote one too."