"Oh, you deep old Italians!"
"There you are," he returned. ... "That's the responsible note."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Of my real, honest fear of being 'off' some day, of being wrong, without knowing it. That's what I shall always trust you for -- to tell me when I am. No --with you people it's a sense. We haven't got it -- not as you have."
"I should be interested," she presently remarked, "to see some sense you don't possess."
Well, he produced one on the spot. "The moral, dear Mrs. Assingham. I mean, always, as you others consider it. I've of course something that in our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. But it's no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase -- half-ruined into the bargain! -- in some castle of our quattrocento is like the 'lightning elevator' in one of Mr. Verver's fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam -- it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that -- well, that it's as short, in almost any case, to turn around and come down again."
"Trusting," Mrs. Assingham smiled, "to get up some other way?"
"Yes -- or not to have to get up at all."
Henry James, The Golden Bowl, chapter 2.
