"You're no worse than the rest," he continued with indifference to her
anger at his bluntness. "You all think that there can be no picture of
Venice without a gondola or a Bridge of Sighs in it. Have you ever read
the Merchant of Venice, or Othello? There isn't a boat nor a bridge nor
a canal mentioned in either of them; and yet they breathe and pulsate
with the very life of Venice. I'm going to try to paint a Venetian
priest so that you'll know him without a bit of conventional Venice
near him."

"It was Shakespeare who wrote those plays," said Florida. Ferris bowed
in mock suffering from her sarcasm. "You'd better have some sort of
symbol in your picture of a Venetian priest, or people will wonder why
you came so far to paint Father O'Brien."

"I don't say I shall succeed," Ferris answered. "In fact I've made one
failure already, and I'm pretty well on with a second; but the
principle is right, all the same. I don't expect everybody to see the
difference between Don Ippolito and Father O'Brien. At any rate, what
I'm going to paint _at_ is the lingering pagan in the man, the
renunciation first of the inherited nature, and then of a personality
that would have enjoyed the world. I want to show that baffled
aspiration, apathetic despair, and rebellious longing which you caten
in his face When he's off his guard, and that suppressed look which is
the characteristic expression of all Austrian Venice. Then," said
Ferris laughing, "T must work in that small suspicion of Jesuit which
there is in every priest. But it's quite possible I may make a Father
O'Brien of him."

"You won't make a Don Ippolito of him," said Florida, after serious