“It will be a fine night to see Venice for the first time,” I suggested.
“Oh, oui! Herrlich! Prachtvoll!” she replied in her queer mixture of French and German.
I liked her command of sounding German words.
She told me the names of stations at which we stopped, and finally she exclaimed quite gaily, “Now we are here! The Lagoon!”
I looked out and we were speeding over a wide body of water. It was beautifully silvery and in the distance I could see the faint outlines of a city. Very shortly we were in a car yard, as at Rome and Florence, and then under a large train shed, and then, conveyed by an enthusiastic Italian porter, we came out on the wide stone platform that faces the Grand Canal. Before me were the white walls of marble buildings and intervening in long, waving lines a great street of water; the gondolas, black, shapely, a great company of them, nudging each other on its rippling bosom, green-stained stone steps, sharply illuminated by electric lights leading down to them, a great crowd of gesticulating porters and passengers. I startled Maria by grabbing her by the arm, exclaiming in German, “Wonderful! Wonderful!”
“Est ist herrlich” (It is splendid), she replied.
We stepped into a gondola, our bags being loaded in afterwards. It was a singularly romantic situation, when you come to think of it: entering Venice by moonlight and gliding off in a gondola in company with an unknown and charming Italian girl who smiled and sighed by turns and fairly glowed with delight and pride at my evident enslavement to the beauty of it all.
She was directing the gondolier where to leave her when I exclaimed, “Don’t leave me—please! Let’s do Venice together!”
She was not offended. She shook her head, a bit regretfully I like to think, and smiled most charmingly. “Venice has gone to your head. To-morrow you’ll forget me!”
And there my adventure ended!