to let them see
that our feelings are with them."

"Yes," said his wife pensively.

"And it is better for us, as Americans abroad, during this war, to be
retired."

"Well, we are retired," said Mrs. Elmore.

"Yes, there is no doubt of that," he returned.

They laughed, and made what they could of chance American acquaintances
at the _caffes_. Elmore had his history to occupy him, and doubtless he
could not understand how heavy the time hung upon his wife's hands. They
went often to the theatre, and every evening they went to the Piazza,
and ate an ice at Florian's. This was certainly amusement; and routine
was so pleasant to his scholarly temperament that he enjoyed merely
that. He made a point of admitting his wife as much as possible into his
intellectual life; he read her his notes as fast as he made them, and he
consulted her upon the management of his theme, which, as his research
extended, he found so vast that he was forced to decide upon a much
lighter treatment than he had at first intended. He had resolved upon a
history which should be presented in a series of biographical studies,
and he was so much interested in this conclusion, and so charmed with
the advantages of the form as they developed themselves, that he began
to lose the sense of social dulness, and ceased to imagine it in his
wife.

A sort of indolence of the sensibilities, in fact, enabled him to endure
_ennui_ that made her frantic, and he was often deeply bored without
knowing it at the time, or without a reasoned suffering. He suffered as
a child suffers, simply, almost ignorantly: it was upon reflection that
his nerves began to quiver with retroactive anguish. He was also able to
idealize the situation when his wife no longer even wished to do so. His
fancy cast a poetry about these Venetian friends, whose conversation
displayed the occasional sparkle of Ollendorff-English on a dark ground
of lagoon-Italian, and whose vivid smiling and gesticulation she
wearied herself in hospitable efforts to outdo. To his eyes their
historic past clothed them with its interest, and the long patience of
their hope and hatred under foreign rule ennobled them, while to hers
they were too often only tiresome visitors, whose powers of silence and
of eloquence were alike to be dreaded. It did not console her as it did
her husband to reflect that they probably bored the Italians as much in
their turn. When a young man, very sympathetic for literature and th