the dimness, jerks away, to make sure of his tip, the old curtain
that isn't much more modern than the wonderful work itself. He
does his best to create light where light can never be; but you
have your practised groping gaze, and in guiding the young eyes
of your less confident associate, moreover, you feel you possess
the treasure. These are the refined pleasures that Venice has
still to give, these odd happy passages of communication and
response.


But the point of my reminiscence is that there were other
communications that day, as there were certainly other responses.
I have forgotten exactly what it was we were looking for--without
much success--when we met the three Sisters. Nothing requires
more care, as a long knowledge of Venice works in, than not to
lose the useful faculty of getting lost. I had so successfully
done my best to preserve it that I could at that moment
conscientiously profess an absence of any suspicion of where we
might be. It proved enough that, wherever we were, we were where
the three sisters found us. This was on a little bridge near a
big campo, and a part of the charm of the matter was the theory
that it was very much out of the way. They took us promptly in
hand--they were only walking over to San Marco to match some
coloured wool for the manufacture of such belated cushions as
still bloom with purple and green in the long leisures of old
palaces; and that mild errand could easily open a parenthesis.
The obscure church we had feebly imagined we were looking for
proved, if I am not mistaken, that of the sisters' parish; as to
which I have but a confused recollection of a large grey void and
of admiring for the first time a fine work of art of which I have