Maria Bastida was a most interesting type. She was a Diana for size, pallid, with a full rounded body. Her hair was almost flaxen and her hands large but not unshapely. She seemed to be strangely world-weary and yet strangely passionate--the kind of mind and body that does and does not, care; a kind of dull, smoldering fire burning within her and yet she seemed indifferent into the bargain. She asked me an occasional question about New York as we dined, and though wine was proffered she drank little and, true to her statement that she was not hungry, ate little. She confided to me in soft, difficult German that she was trying not to get too stout, that her mother was German and her father Italian and that she had been visiting an uncle in Florence who was in the grocery business. I wondered how she came to be traveling first class. The time passed. Dinner was over and in several hours more we would be in Venice. We returned to our compartment and because the moon was shining magnificently we stood in the corridor and watched its radiance on clustered cypresses, villa-crowned hills, great stretches of flat prairie or marsh land, all barren of trees, and occasionally on little towns all white and brown, glistening in the clear light. “It will be a fine night to see Venice for the first time,” I suggested. “_Oh, oui! Herrlich! Prachtvoll!_” she replied in her queer mixture of French and German. I liked her command of sounding German words. She told me the names of stations at which we stopped, and finally she exclaimed quite gaily, “Now we are here! The Lagoon!” I looked out and we were speeding over a wide body of water. It was beautifully silvery and in the distance I could see the faint outlines of a city. Very shortly we were in a car yard, as at Rome and Florence, and then under a large train shed, and then, conveyed by an enthusiastic Italian porter, we came out on the wide stone platform that faces the Grand Canal. Before me were the white walls of marble buildings and intervening in long, waving lines a great street of water; the gondolas, black, shapely, a great company of them, nudging each other on its rippling bosom, green-stained stone steps, sharply illuminated by electric lights leading down to them, a great crowd of gesticulating porters and passengers. I startled Maria by grabbing her by the arm, exclaiming in German, “Wonderful! Wonderful!” “_Est ist herrlich_” (It is splendid), she replied. We stepped into a gondola, our bags being loaded in afterwards. It was a singularly romantic situation, when you come to think of it: entering Venice by moonlight and gliding off in a gondola in company with an unknown and charming Italian girl who smiled and sighed by turns and fairly glowed with delight and pride at my evident enslavement to the beauty of it all. She was directing the gondolier where to leave her when I exclaimed, “Don’t leave me--please! Let’s do Venice together!”