Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of the lagoons.
We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be glorious freedoms.
Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her previous Italian
journey--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother across Italy to the
westward route--and now she could fill up her gaps and see the Titians
and Paul Veroneses she already knew in colourless photographs, the
Carpaccios, (the St. George series delighted her beyond measure,)
the Basaitis and that great statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin
praised.

But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural effects
day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a thousand
memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping a little
forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered familiar masterpiece
and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can hear again the soft
cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace comments, for she had no
gift of expressing the shapeless satisfaction these things gave her.

Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated
person with whom I had ever come into close contact. She was cultivated
and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of these things. She
was passive, and I am active. She did not simply and naturally look
for beauty but she had been incited to look for it at school, and took
perhaps a keener interest in books and lectures and all the organisation
of beautiful things than she did in beauty itself; she found much of her
delight in being guided to it. Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me
when some finger points me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life,
but I take my beauty as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of
the meal....

And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more
beautiful than any picture....

So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases and
such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such things
as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent, New York,
with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned to London,
with the development of a theory of Margaret.

Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and
destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had gone
on in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to me, and a
very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisatio