It had been the gallery of some palazzo in old days, was above one hundred feet in length, fairly broad, with a roof of wooden rafters and large windows opening on a courtyard garden.  I could see the tops of three cypress-trees cutting the grey sky upon a level with us.  A long table occupied the centre of this room.  It had been laid for upwards of forty persons, and we filled it.  There was plenty of light from great glass lustres blazing with gas.  When the ladies had arranged their dresses, and the gentlemen had exchanged a few polite remarks, we all sat down to dinner—­I next my inexorable widow, Eustace beside his calm and comely partner.  The first impression was one of disappointment.  It looked so like a public dinner of middle-class people.  There was no local character in costume or customs.  Men and women sat politely bored, expectant, trifling with their napkins, yawning, muttering nothings about the weather or their neighbours.  The frozen commonplaceness of the scene was made for me still more oppressive by Signora dell’ Acqua.  She was evidently satirical, and could not be happy unless continually laughing at or with somebody.  ‘What a stick the woman will think me!’ I kept saying to myself.  ’How shall I ever invent jokes in this strange land?  I cannot even flirt with her in Venetian!  And here I have condemned myself—­and her too, poor thing—­to sit through at least three hours of mortal dulness!’ Yet the widow was by no means unattractive.  Dressed in black, she had contrived by an artful arrangement of lace and jewellery to give an air of lightness to her costume.  She had a pretty little pale face, a minois chiffonne, with slightly turned-up nose, large laughing brown eyes, a dazzling set of teeth, and a tempestuously frizzled mop of powdered hair.  When I managed to get a side-look at her quietly, without being giggled at or driven half mad by unintelligible incitements to a jocularity I could not feel, it struck me that, if we once found a common term of communication we should become good friends.  But for the moment that modus vivendi seemed unattainable.  She had not recovered from the first excitement of her capture of me.  She was still showing me off and trying to stir me up.  The arrival of the soup gave me a momentary relief; and soon the serious business of the afternoon began.  I may add that before dinner was over, the Signora dell’ Acqua and I were fast friends.  I had discovered the way of making jokes, and she had become intelligible.  I found her a very nice, though flighty, little woman; and I believe she thought me gifted with the faculty of uttering eccentric epigrams in a grotesque tongue.  Some of my remarks were flung about the table, and had the same success as uncouth Lombard carvings have with connoisseurs in naivetes of art.  By that time we had come to be compare and comare to each other—­the sequel of some clumsy piece of jocularity.