after. The story did not hang together, and I even
asked myself whether it were not a trap laid for me, the result of a
design to make me show my hand. I could not have told why my companions
(as they could only by courtesy be called) should have this purpose--why
they should try to trip up so lucrative a lodger. At any rate I kept on
my guard, so that Miss Tita should not have occasion again to ask me if
I had an arriere-pensee. Poor woman, before we parted for the night my
mind was at rest as to HER capacity for entertaining one.

She told me more about their affairs than I had hoped; there was no
need to be prying, for it evidently drew her out simply to feel that I
listened, that I cared. She ceased wondering why I cared, and at last,
as she spoke of the brilliant life they had led years before, she almost
chattered. It was Miss Tita who judged it brilliant; she said that when
they first came to live in Venice, years and years before (I saw that
her mind was essentially vague about dates and the order in which events
had occurred), there was scarcely a week that they had not some visitor
or did not make some delightful passeggio in the city. They had seen all
the curiosities; they had even been to the Lido in a boat (she spoke
as if I might think there was a way on foot); they had had a collation
there, brought in three baskets and spread out on the grass. I asked
her what people they had known and she said, Oh! very nice ones--the
Cavaliere Bombicci and the Contessa Altemura, with whom they had had a
great friendship. Also English people--the Churtons and the Goldies and
Mrs. Stock-Stock, whom they had loved dearly; she was dead and gone,
poor dear. That was the case with most of their pleasant circle (this
expression was Miss Tita's own), though a few were left, which was a
wonder considering how they had neglected them. She mentioned the names
of two or three Venetian old women; of a certain doctor, very clever,
who was so kind--he came as a friend, he had really given up practice;
of the avvocato Pochintesta, who wrote beautiful poems and had addressed
one to her aunt. These people came to see them without fail every year,
usually at the capo d'anno, and of old her aunt used to make them some
little present--her aunt and she together: small things that she, Miss
Tita, made herself, like paper lampshades or mats for the decanters of
wine at dinner or those woolen things that in cold weather were worn
on the wrist