That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial
lake in uneven confused country, as something very bright and
skylike, and discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of
the very sunshine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and
places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed splendours, the
whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearse-black gondolas, for
the horrible steam launch had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled
magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made
me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality.
There was not a dozen people all told, no Americans and scarcely any
English, to dine in the big cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas
of separate tables, its distempered walls and its swathed
chandeliers. We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting
beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well
with ourselves and the world. It was ten days or a fortnight before
I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for
such a temperament as mine.

Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared
aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no
exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost
shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help
us out. It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be
very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the
sensuous note. Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of
the lagoons. We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be
glorious freedoms. Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her
previous Italian journey--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother