Mr. Osborne remembered that Dora had told him that Venice was the most beautiful place in the world, and the Grand Canal the most beautiful thing in Venice. And he made a concession that he did not really feel.
“Not but what he hadn’t got a lot to compete against,” he said. “That bridge now? That’s a fine thing. And the curve of it looks built for strength. I warrant there’s no iron girder made that would cause it to be safer. And the houses, beautiful, I’m sure! But I don’t see any that I’d sooner take than the Palazzo Dandoli.”
Suddenly Dora felt something dry up inside her. That, at any rate, was how she mentally phrased the sensation to herself. Her father-in-law was kind and wise and good; he was anxious to please, he was anxious to be pleased. But at the concession—for so she felt it to be—that Per had had a lot to compete with, when the excruciating iron arcade of the fish market was erected within stone-throw of the Rialto and within pea-shooting distance of the wondrous canal, she felt for the moment the impossibility of herself and Mr. Osborne being together at Venice. The situation was one that she had not faced without a tremor; now, for the moment, when it was actual and accomplished, it was inconceivable.
But this mercantile discovery had delighted Mr. Osborne; it had clearly raised his previous estimate of Venice. A town that could so aptly enshrine this design of Per’s was a town that must receive the best attention. There was probably more in it than he had been at first disposed to imagine. He gave it his best attention.
A gray fussing steamboat going seaward on the tide and raising a huge wash of churned water, next engaged his admiration.
“Well, and if I didn’t think when we took so long to get to the Palazzo last night that the Italians would be wiser to build a big sea wall somewhere, and raise the level of the canal so as you could drive a horse and carriage down them!” he said. “But if you’ve got a ferry steamer that goes the pace of that—Lor’, my dear, how it makes us rock—I don’t see what there’s to complain of. And calling first on this side and then on that, same as they used to do on the Thames, what could you ask for more convenient?”
Again Dora had to enlist her sympathy on a foreign side.
“I know,” she said, “and they go right out to the Lido, where we’ll go and bathe this very afternoon, Dad. It will be awfully hot after lunch, so we’ll join the steamer at San Marco, and send the gondola out to meet us on the Lido, and take us back when it gets cooler. One gets roasted in a gondola on the lagoon when it’s as hot as this.”
Mr. Osborne was clearly a little troubled at this suggestion.
“Ah, no doubt there are sets of bathing machines,” he said at length. “A dip in the briny: very pleasant.”