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.”
Dora did not at once grasp the cause of his embarrassment.
“We’ll swim right out together,” she said. “You can swim for ever in this sea; it’s so buoyant. And then we sit on the sand and eat strawberries, while the sun dries us again.”
Then she saw that some portentous doubt on the question of propriety was in Mr. Osborne’s mind, guessed it, and hastened to remove the cause of it. “Or perhaps, coming straight out from England, you don’t want to bathe,” she said. “Besides, there’s the mater”--she had adopted this from Claude. “So we won’t bathe; we’ll take her out for a _giro_--a row--in the gondola and have tea out on the lagoon. Dad, you’ll love the lagoon, all gray and green. And the electric light poles cross it to the Lido.”
“Eh, that will be nice,” said Mr. Osborne quickly and appreciatively. “And here’s another bridge: why, beautiful, isn’t it? I think I like it better than that curved one. There seems more sense in it. You don’t have to mount so high.”
They had passed round the last corner of the canal, and in front of them lay the straight lower reach of it that passes into the great basin opposite St. Mark’s and the Doge’s palace. To right and left the stately houses stood up from the water side, in glimmer of rose and blue and orange beneath the smiting glory of the noonday. Since yesterday the north wind, blowing lightly from the Alps, had banished the oppression of yesterday’s heat and the glitter of the city had awoke again, pearly in the shadow and jewelled in the sun. And in the immediate foreground the only blot of disfigurement was the object of Mr. Osborne’s admiration, the flat, execrable iron bridge opposite the Accademia. There it lay, convenient and hideous and impossible. And he liked it better than the curved one! It had more sense in it!