“Well,” I said, “it’s been very successful.  I’m all braced up.  I’m glad we have had such a good excuse for coming.”  A fib is sometimes necessary to one’s self-respect.

“Preme!” cried the gondolier, and we shaved past the gondola of a solitary gentleman just leaving the steps of the Hotel Britannia.

“That was a shave!” poppa exclaimed, and added somewhat inconsequently, “You might just as well not speak so loud.”

“I’ve always liked Arty,” he continued, as we glided on.

“So have I,” I returned cordially.

“He’s in many ways a lovely fellow,” said poppa.

“I guess he is,” said I.

“I don’t believe,” ventured my parent, “that his matrimonial ideas have cooled down any.”

“I hope he may marry well,” I said.  “Has he decided on Frankie Turner?”

“He has come to no decision that you don’t know about.  Of course, I have no desire to interfere where it isn’t any of my business, but if you wish to gratify your poppa, daughter, you will obey him in this matter, and permit Arthur once more to—­to come round evenings as he used to.  He is a young man of moderate income, but a very level head, and it is the wish of my heart to see you reconciled.”

“Sorry I can’t oblige you, poppa,” I said.  I certainly was not going to have any reconciliation effected by poppa.

“You’d better just consider it, daughter.  I don’t want to interfere—­but you know my desire, my command.”

“Senator,” said I, “you don’t seem to realise that it takes more than a gondola to make a paternal Doge.  I’ve got to ask you to remember that I was born in Chicago.  And it’s my bed time.  Gondolier! Albergo!  Andate presto!”

“He seems to understand you,” said poppa meekly.

So we dropped Arthur—­dropped him, so to speak, into the Grand Canal, and I really felt callous at the time as to whether he should ever come up again.

But the Senator’s joy in Venice found other means of expressing itself.  One was an active and disinterested appeal to the gondoliers to be a little less modern in their costume.  He approached this subject through the guide with every gondolier in turn, and the smiling impassiveness with which his suggestions were received still causes him wonder and disgust.  “I presume,” he remonstrated, “you think you earn your living because tourists have got to get from the Accademia to St. Mark’s, and from St. Mark’s to the Bridge of Sighs, but that’s only a quarter of the reason.  The other three-quarters is because they like to be rowed there in gondolas by the gondoliers they’ve read about, and the gondoliers they’ve read about wore proper gondoliering clothes—­they didn’t look like East River loafers.”

“They are poor men, these gondolieri,” remarked the guide.  “They cannot afford.”