Two Old Houses and Three Young Women - Page 2

description of the better part of
your thought. Is it really your fault if the place makes you want
so desperately to read history into everything?

You do that wherever you turn and wherever you look, and you do
it, I should say, most of all at night. It comes to you there
with longer knowledge, and with all deference to what flushes and
shimmers, that the night is the real time. It perhaps even
wouldn't take much to make you award the palm to the nights of
winter. This is certainly true for the form of progression that
is most characteristic, for every question of departure and
arrival by gondola. The little closed cabin of this perfect
vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the
indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you don't
see and all the things you do feel--each dim recognition and
obscure arrest is a possible throb of your sense of being floated
to your doom, even when the truth is simply and sociably that you
are going out to tea. Nowhere else is anything as innocent so
mysterious, nor anything as mysterious so pleasantly deterrent to
protest. These are the moments when you are most daringly
Venetian, most content to leave cheap trippers and other aliens
the high light of the mid-lagoon and the pursuit of pink and
gold. The splendid day is good enough for them; what is
best for you is to stop at last, as you are now stopping, among
clustered pali and softly-shifting poops and prows, at a
great flight of water-steps that play their admirable part in the
general effect of a great entrance. The high doors stand open
from them to the paved chamber of a basement tremendously tall
and not vulgarly lighted, from which, in turn, mounts the slow
stone staircase that draws you further on. The great point is,
that if you are worthy of this impression at all, there isn't a
single item of it of which the association isn't noble. Hold to
it fast that there is no other such dignity of arrival as arrival
by water. Hold to it that to float and slacken and gently bump,
to creep out of the low, dark felze and make the few
guided movements and find the strong crooked and offered arm, and
then, beneath lighted palace-windows, pass up the few damp steps
on the precautionary carpet--hold to it that these things
constitute a preparation of which the only defect is that it may
sometimes perhaps really prepare too much. It's so stately that
what can come after?--it's so good in itself that what, upstairs,
as we comparative vulgarians say, can be better? Hold to it, at
any rate, that if a lady, in especial, scrambles out of a
carriage, tumbles out of a cab, flops out of a tram-car, and
hurtles, projectile-like, out of a "lightning-elevator," she
alights from the Venetian