“Reisen Sie nach Venedig?” I inquired.
“Oui,” she nodded. She half smiled again.
I had a real thrill of satisfaction out of all this, for although I speak abominable German, just sufficient to make myself understood by a really clever person, yet I knew, by the exercise of a little tact I should have a companion to dinner.
“You will take dinner with me, won’t you?” I stammered in my best German. “I do not understand German very well, but perhaps we can make ourselves understood. I have two places.”
She hesitated, and said—“Ich bin nicht hungerich.”
“But for company’s sake,” I replied.
“Mais, oui,” she replied indifferently.
I then asked her whether she was going to any particular hotel in Venice—I was bound for the Royal Danieli—and she replied that her home was in Venice.
Maria Bastida was a most interesting type. She was a Diana for size, pallid, with a full rounded body. Her hair was almost flaxen and her hands large but not unshapely. She seemed to be strangely world-weary and yet strangely passionate—the kind of mind and body that does and does not, care; a kind of dull, smoldering fire burning within her and yet she seemed indifferent into the bargain. She asked me an occasional question about New York as we dined, and though wine was proffered she drank little and, true to her statement that she was not hungry, ate little. She confided to me in soft, difficult German that she was trying not to get too stout, that her mother was German and her father Italian and that she had been visiting an uncle in Florence who was in the grocery business. I wondered how she came to be traveling first class.
The time passed. Dinner was over and in several hours more we would be in Venice. We returned to our compartment and because the moon was shining magnificently we stood in the corridor and watched its radiance on clustered cypresses, villa-crowned hills, great stretches of flat prairie or marsh land, all barren of trees, and occasionally on little towns all white and brown, glistening in the clear light.