“No. It didn’t agree with me. It depressed me. We were there in the mosquito season.”
“What has that to do with it?”
“My dear Sir Donald, if you’d ever had a hole in your net you’d know. I made Fritz take me away after two days, and I’ve never been back. I don’t want to have my one beauty ruined.”
Sir Donald did not pay the reasonable compliment. He only stretched out his lean hands over his knees, and said:
“Venice is the only ideal city in Europe.”
“You forget Paris.”
“Paris!” said Sir Donald. “Paris is a suburb of London and New York. Paris is no longer the city of light, but the city of pornography and dressmakers.”
“Well, I don’t know exactly what pornography is—unless it’s some new process for taking snapshots. But I do know what gowns are, and I love Paris. The Venice shops are failures and the Venice mosquitoes are successes, and I hate Venice.”
An expression of lemon-coloured amazement appeared upon Sir Donald’s face, and he glanced at Robin Pierce as if requesting the answer to a riddle. Robin looked rather as if he were enjoying himself, but the puzzled melancholy grew deeper on Sir Donald’s face. With the air of a man determined to reassure his mind upon some matter, however, he spoke again.
“You visited the European capitals?” he said.