“Oh, electric light, I think,” said Dora. “Or perhaps it’s telephone.”
“My word, and I never expected to find either here,” said Mr. Osborne. “Do you mean they have got the light and the ’phone? And why, if that’s so, aren’t they installed in the Dandoli?”
“Oh, Dad,” she said, “where do you want to telephone to?”
“No, dearie, I don’t want to telephone, but you’d have thought that in a place like that I’ve taken they’d surely have had the modern conveniences, if such were to be had. And where are we coming to now?”
Dora did not answer at once; this was one of the best places of all in that city of best places. There was a sharp turn from a narrow canal, overhung by tall red-stained walls, and they shot out into the Grand Canal just above the Rialto.
“Oh,” she said, “look, look!”
The bow-shaped bridge lay to their left, as from the huddled houses they swept into the great waterway; a troubled reflection of palaces gleamed in the tide, the curve of the Grand Canal was flung outward and onward, reeling in the heat.
Just opposite was the fish market, newly rebuilt, with columns of ornamented iron work. Mr. Osborne pointed an admiring forefinger at it.
“Well I never,” he said, “to think to see the fellow of one of Per’s designs in Venice. I shall have the laugh of Per over that, and tell him he copied them from some old courtyard of the Doges, or what not. Beautiful I call them. After all, they were wonderful old folk, weren’t they, when we think that they put up there a design that might have been made in Sheffield to-day! I assure you, dearie, they are just like Per’s drawings for No. 2 light arcade same as is in the showroom at the works.”
Dora had not been attending very closely: those who love Venice are apt to be inattentive when some new magic comes into view, and to Dora the bow-arch of the bridge with the bow-arch of the canal below grew in wonder the oftener that she saw it.