So explains the louche, patently expert Lieutenant Niki von Preyn (Maurice Chevalier) to Princess Anna (Miriam Hopkins), who, newly introduced to the exigencies of physical desire, is eager to master the social and sexual codes that are left unreferenced in the carefully curated Royal Encyclopedia that has been her sole guide to the ways of the world. The distance as well as the distinction between a smile and the conspiratorial wink—which signals a determination to act on a (crucially) unvoiced feeling—delineate the artistic as well as social and erotic compass of Ernst Lubitsch's first sound films. That it is Hopkins who ultimately masters the art of the wink attests to her importance in Lubitsch's transition from the gestural language of silent films to the vociferous ideologies, especially in respect to gender, of talking pictures. In three successive, increasingly inventive, morally adventurous films—The Smiling Lieutenant (Lubitsch, 1931), Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch, 1932), and Design for Living (Lubitsch, 1933)—Hopkins channeled and idiosyncratically modernized Lubitsch's Old World sophistication in physically and vocally inflected performances that announced a new comic figure: the woman who winks, we might call this screen avatar of openly desirous, exuberantly modern, morally reckless (even cheerfully larcenous!) womanhood.