I.
When I was in Venice I knew the Marchesa Negropontini. Many strangers knew her twenty and thirty years ago. In my time she was old and somewhat withdrawn from society; but as I had been a fellow-student and friend of her grand-nephew in Vienna, I was admitted into her house familiarly, until the old lady felt as kindly toward me, as if I, too, had been a nephew.
Italian life and character are different enough from ours. They are traditionally romantic. But we are apt to disbelieve in the romance which we hear from those concerned. I cannot disbelieve, since I knew this sad, stern Italian woman. Can you disbelieve, who have seen Titian's, and Tintoretto's, and Paolo Veronese's portraits of Venetian women? You, who have floated about the canals of Venice?
I was an American boy; and my very utter strangeness probably made it easier for the Marchesa Negropontini to tell me the story, which I now relate. She told it to me as we sat one evening in the balcony of her house, the palazzo Orfeo, on the Grand Canal.