These people came to see them without fail every year,
usually at the capo d'anno, and of old her aunt used
to make them some little present--her aunt and she together:
small things that she, Miss Tita, made herself, like paper
lampshades or mats for the decanters of wine at dinner or those
woolen things that in cold weather were worn on the wrists.
The last few years there had not been many presents;
she could not think what to make, and her aunt had lost her
interest and never suggested. But the people came all the same;
if the Venetians liked you once they liked you forever.

There was something affecting in the good faith of this
sketch of former social glories; the picnic at the Lido had
remained vivid through the ages, and poor Miss Tita evidently
was of the impression that she had had a brilliant youth.
She had in fact had a glimpse of the Venetian world in
its gossiping, home-keeping, parsimonious, professional walks;
for I observed for the first time that she had acquired
by contact something of the trick of the familiar,
soft-sounding, almost infantile speech of the place.
I judged that she had imbibed this invertebrate dialect
from the natural way the names of things and people--
mostly purely local--rose to her lips. If she knew little
of what they represented she knew still less of anything else.
Her aunt had drawn in--her failing interest in the table mats
and lampshades was a sign of that--and she had not been able
to mingle in society or to entertain it alone; so that the matter
of her reminiscences struck one as an old world altogether.
If she had not been so decent her references would have seemed
to carry one back to the queer rococo Venice of Casanova.