XVII

But in her inner consciousness she was keeping touch with the other man. She mustn’t let her connection with him go: oh, she mustn’t let it go, or she was lost, lost utterly in this world of riff-raffy expensive people and joy-hogs. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh “enjoying oneself!” Another modern form of sickness.

They left the car in Mestre, in garage, and took the regular steamer over to Venice. It was a lovely summer afternoon, the shallow lagoon rippled, the full sunshine made Venice, turning its back to them across the water, look dim.

At the station quay they changed to a gondola, giving the man the address. He was a regular gondolier in a white-and-blue blouse, not very good-looking, not at all impressive.

“Yes! The Villa Esmeralda! Yes! I know it! I have been the gondolier for a gentleman there. But a fair distance out!”

He seemed a rather childish, impetuous fellow. He rowed with a certain exaggerated impetuosity, through the dark side-canals with the horrible, slimy green walls, the canals that go through the poorer quarters, where the washing hangs high up on ropes, and there is a slight, or strong odour of sewage.

But at last he came to one of the open canals with pavement on either side, and looping bridges, that run straight, at right angles to the Grand Canal. The two women sat under the little awning, the man was perched above, behind them.

“Are the signorine staying long at the Villa Esmeralda?” he asked, rowing easy, and wiping his perspiring face with a white-and-blue handkerchief.

“Some twenty days: we are both married ladies,” said Hilda, in her curious hushed voice, that made her Italian sound so foreign.