Venice was the French girl’s dream.  She was realizing it hungrily, revelling in it, anatomizing it, picking it to pieces, reviewing it, comparing her work with the original, and the original with her first conception, until beautiful sad Venice threatened to be no more her dream, and in dread of disenchantment she tried to take impressions humbly, really tasked herself not to analyze, not to dictate from a French footing, not to scorn.  Not to be petulant with objects disappointing her, was an impossible task.  She could not consent to a compromise with the people, the merchandize, the odours of the city.  Gliding in the gondola through the narrow canals at low tide, she leaned back simulating stupor, with one word—­’Venezia!’ Her brother was commanded to smoke:  ‘Fumez, fumez, Roland!’ As soon as the steel-crested prow had pushed into her Paradise of the Canal Grande, she quietly shrouded her hair from tobacco, and called upon rapture to recompense her for her sufferings.  The black gondola was unendurable to her.  She had accompanied her father to the Accademia, and mused on the golden Venetian streets of Carpaccio:  she must have an open gondola to decorate in his manner, gaily, splendidly, and mock at her efforts—­a warning to all that might hope to improve the prevailing gloom and squalor by levying contributions upon the Merceria!  Her most constant admiration was for the English lord who used once to ride on the Lido sands and visit the Armenian convent—­a lord and a poet. [Lord Byron D.W.]

This was to be infinitely more than a naval lieutenant.  But Nevil claimed her as little personally as he allowed her to be claimed by another.  The graces of her freaks of petulance and airy whims, her sprightly jets of wilfulness, fleeting frowns of contempt, imperious decisions, were all beautiful, like silver-shifting waves, in this lustrous planet of her pure freedom; and if you will seize the divine conception of Artemis, and own the goddess French, you will understand his feelings.

But though he admired fervently, and danced obediently to her tunes, Nevil could not hear injustice done to a people or historic poetic city without trying hard to right the mind guilty of it.  A newspaper correspondent, a Mr. John Holles, lingering on his road home from the army, put him on the track of an Englishman’s books—­touching the spirit as well as the stones of Venice, and Nevil thanked him when he had turned some of the leaves.

The study of the books to school Renee was pursued, like the Bianchina’s sleep, in gondoletta, and was not unlike it at intervals.  A translated sentence was the key to a reverie.  Renee leaned back, meditating; he forward, the book on his knee:  Roland left them to themselves, and spied for the Bianchina behind the window-bars.  The count was in the churches or the Galleries.  Renee thought she began to comprehend the spirit of Venice, and chided her rebelliousness.

‘But our Venice was the Venice of the decadence, then!’ she said, complaining.  Nevil read on, distrustful of the perspicuity of his own ideas.