e
Americans, spent an evening, as it seemed to her, in crying nothing but
"Per Bacco!" she owned that she liked better his oppressor, who once
came by chance, in the figure of a young lieutenant, and who unbuckled
his wife, as he called his sword, and, putting her in a corner, sat up
on a chair in the middle of the room and sang like a bird, and then told
ghost-stories. The songs were out of Heine, and they reminded her of her
girlish enthusiasm for German. Elmore was troubled at the lieutenant's
visit, and feared it would cost them all their Italian friends; but she
said boldly that she did not care; and she never even tried to believe
that the life they saw in Venice was comparable to that of their little
college town at home, with its teas and picnics, and simple, easy social
gayeties. There she had been a power in her way; she had entertained,
and had helped to make some matches: but the Venetians ate nothing, and
as for young people, they never saw each other but by stealth, and their
matches were made by their parents on a money-basis. She could not adapt
herself to this foreign life; it puzzled her, and her husband's
conformity seemed to estrange them, as far as it went. It took away her
spirit, and she grew listless and dull. Even the history began to lose
its interest in her eyes; she doubted if the annals of such a people as
she saw about her could ever be popular.

There were other things to make them melancholy in their exile. The war
at home was going badly, where it was going at all. The letters now
never spoke of any term to it; they expressed rather the dogged patience
of the time when it seemed as if there could be no end, and indicated
that the country had settled into shape about it, and was pushing
forward its other affairs as if the war did not exist. Mrs. Elmore felt
that the America which she had left had ceased to be. The letters were
almost less a pleasure than a pain, but she always tore them open, and
read them with eager unhappiness. There were miserable intervals of days
and even weeks when no letters came, and when the Reuter telegrams in
the Gazette of Venice dribbled their vitriolic news of Northern
disaster through a few words or lines, and Galignani's long columns were
filled with the hostile exultation and prophecy of the London press.

III.

They had passed eighteen months of this sort of life in Venice when one
day a letter dropped into it which sent a thousand ripples over its