oth sides stretched marble palaces; they seemed to
float softly by, scarcely letting the eye seize or absorb their beauty.
Elena felt herself deeply happy; in the perfect blue of her heavens
there was only one dark cloud--and it was in the far distance; Insarov
was much better that day. They glided as far as the acute angle of the
Rialto and turned back. Elena was afraid of the chill of the churches
for Insarov; but she remembered the academy delle Belle Arti, and told
the gondolier to go towards it. They quickly walked through all the
rooms of that little museum. Being neither connoisseurs nor dilettantes,
they did not stop before every picture; they put no constraint on
themselves; a spirit of light-hearted gaiety came over them. Everything
seemed suddenly very entertaining. (Children know this feeling very
well.) To the great scandal of three English visitors, Elena laughed
till she cried over the St Mark of Tintoretto, skipping down from the
sky like a frog into the water, to deliver the tortured slave; Insarov
in his turn fell into raptures over the back and legs of the sturdy man
in the green cloak, who stands in the foreground of Titian's Ascension
and holds his arms outstretched after the Madonna; but the Madonna--a
splendid, powerful woman, calmly and majestically making her way towards
the bosom of God the Father--impressed both Insarov and Elena; they
liked, too, the austere and reverent painting of the elder Cima da
Conegliano. As they were leaving the academy, they took another look
at the Englishmen behind them--with their long rabbit-like teeth and
drooping whiskers--and laughed; they glanced at their gondolier with his
abbreviated jacket and short breeches--and laughed; they caught sight of
a woman selling old clothes with a knob of grey hair on the very top
of her head--and laughed more than ever; they looked into one another's
face--and went off into peals of laughter, and directly they had sat
down in the gondola, they clasped each other's hand in a close, close
grip. They reached their hotel, ran into their room, and ordered dinner
to be brought in. Their gaiety did not desert them at dinner. They
pressed each other to eat, drank to the health of their friends in
Moscow, clapped their hands at the waiter for a delicious dish of fish,
and kept asking him for live _frutti di mare_; the waiter shrugged his
shoulders and scraped with his feet, but when he had left them, he shook
his head and once even mutt