"But," said Lawrence; "that won't do, you know. St. Mark's and Limburg! that opinion cannot stand. What makes you say so?"
"I don't know," said Dolly. "I have a feeling that the people who built that were more in earnest than the people who built this."
"More in earnest? I beg your pardon!" said Lawrence. "What can you mean? I should say people were in earnest enough here, to judge by the riches of the place. Just see the adornment everywhere, and the splendour."
"Yes," said Dolly, "I see. It is partly that. Though there was adornment, and riches too, at the other place. But the style of it is different. Those grave old towers at Limburg seemed striving up into the sky. I don't see any striving here; in the building, I mean."
"Why, there are pinnacles enough," said Lawrence, in comical inability to fathom her meaning, or answer her.
"Yes," said Dolly; "and domes; but the pinnacles do not strive after anything, and the cupolas seem to settle down like great extinguishers upon everything like striving."
Lawrence laughed, and thought in his own mind that Dolly was a little American, wanting culture, and knowing nothing about architecture.
"What is that great long building?" Mrs. Copley now inquired.
"That, mother?—that is the palace of the Doges. Where is the Bridge of Sighs?"
They went round to look at it from the Ponte della Paglia. Nearer investigation had to be deferred, or, Dolly saw, it would be too literally a bridge of sighs to them that morning. They turned their backs on the splendours, ecclesiastical and secular, of the Place of St. Mark, and proceeded to the store of second-hand curiosities St. Leger had promised Mrs. Copley, the visit to which could no longer be deferred. Dolly was in a dream of delight all the way. Sunlight on the old palaces, on the bridges over the canals, on the wonderful carvings of marbles, on the strange water-ways; sunlight and colour; ay, and shadow and colour too, for the sun could not get in everywhere. Between the beauty and picturesqueness, and the wealth of old historic legend and story clustering about it everywhere, Dolly's dream was entrancing.