beauty. Elena felt herself deeply happy; in the perfect blue of her
heavens there was only one dark cloud--and it was in the far distance;
Insarov was much better that day. They glided as far as the acute
angle of the Rialto and turned back. Elena was afraid of the chill of
the churches for Insarov; but she remembered the academy delle Belle
Arti, and told the gondolier to go towards it. They quickly walked
through all the rooms of that little museum. Being neither
connoisseurs nor dilettantes, they did not stop before every picture;
they put no constraint on themselves; a spirit of light-hearted
gaiety came over them. Everything seemed suddenly very entertaining.
(Children know this feeling very well.) To the great scandal of three
English visitors, Elena laughed till she cried over the St Mark of
Tintoretto, skipping down from the sky like a frog into the water, to
deliver the tortured slave; Insarov in his turn fell into raptures
over the back and legs of the sturdy man in the green cloak, who
stands in the foreground of Titian's Ascension and holds his arms
outstretched after the Madonna; but the Madonna--a splendid, powerful
woman, calmly and majestically making her way towards the bosom of God
the Father--impressed both Insarov and Elena; they liked, too, the
austere and reverent painting of the elder Cima da Conegliano. As they
were leaving the academy, they took another look at the Englishmen
behind them--with their long rabbit-like teeth and drooping
whiskers--and laughed; they glanced at their gondolier with his
abbreviated jacket and short breeches--and laughed; they caught sight
of a woman selling old clothes with a knob of grey hair on the very
top of her head--and laughed more than ever; they looked into one
another's face--and went off into peals of laughter, and directly they
had sat down in the gondola, they clasped each other's hand in a
close, close grip. They reached their hotel, ran into their room, and
ordered dinner to be brought in. Their gaiety did not desert them at