London for ever - 24

One day  a girl,  who struck me at first sight for her pleasing appearance, stopped to look at some badges, who were showed in a moving showcase in the centre of the shop that housed my sales outlet.

She was tall and slim and had short cut and combed back reddish hair; The green eyes, of a very intense color, stood on a freckled face, with a well-proportioned nose, slightly upside down.

She was standing there, his chin protruding forward, as if she  were short-sighted, rotating  the shopwindow on its four sides, with a little enthusiastic expression on his face.

I felt a sudden impulse; I came up and gave her one of the "badges" that stood down, pinned, like the others, on the velvet covering the exterior walls of the window.

- "This is perhaps the best one," I said, handing it over.

She turned and spoke softly, after watching me for a moment with the badge  in her long, slender fingers, she said,

-" Are you Spanish?"

- "They ask me many," I said, amused - "I wonder why!"

-"An Englishman, of course, would never offer a rose to an unknown person!"

There was no tone of reproach or annoyance in his saying; Indeed, it seemed to me to catch a flattery in the woman's voice.

- "Where do you come from?" I asked in turn.

- "I am Irish, but lately, between one trip and the other, I spent a lot of time in Spain and I repeat it, looking at you, you look like Spanish. You have at least a few Spanish blood in the veins, don’t you? "

- "Well, you can say it! Spain has dominated us for over four centuries and who knows? My official language is Italian anyway! "

- "I did not make it a matter of official idiom," she said, dropping that speech.

- "Do you feel like taking  four steps outside?" I replied immediately.

- "Yes, why not!",  she retorted.

I handed the cash coin and the ice cream lever to the shop manager's store, begging him to look at the machines in my absence. Although the operations of the two activities were separate, there was between us ice cream sellers and the staff of the store that housed us, a  solid and sympathetic relationship.

24. to be continued...