“Really, I don’t understand you.“
She looked at me frankly–too frankly–that was the trouble. I hesitated. In spite of the flimsy excuses her aunt had suspiciously erected, I had brought Jacqueline alone with me here to tell her why I must not allow myself to love her; and, I may add, to hear her laugh to delicious scorn my reasons. And yet I hesitated. Sometimes I felt she cared for me. But if I answered her question truthfully, I risked a cruel awakening.
“Do you know how long I have been living in Venice?” I asked presently, with apparent irrelevance.
“Three years, is it not?”
“That is a long time to be dreaming and loafing, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Her eyes looked gravely out on the lagoon.
“And it seems to you hardly a manly, strenuous life for a man of–shall we say–thirty years of age, to spend three years rocking himself to sleep, as it were, in a gondola?”
“No,” she laughed nervously; “hardly a strenuous life.”
“Such a life as that,” I persisted, “must contrast rather unfavorably with the lives of men you know in New York, for example?”
“I suppose one may spend one’s life well even here in Venice.”