Why did I feel so annoyed? "Trist," I said, "Trist is not likely to marry any one." "We must bring them together," Miss Gold replied. "I don't think that is at all necessary," I said. "I hate match-making or any kind of interference with people." Miss Gold smiled. "Well," she said, as Naomi returned, "good-bye. I am so glad I can count on you. Now I can die more happily." CHAPTER XXI WE ARE WHIRLED AWAY BY THE 2.20 FROM CHARING CROSS AND MEET THE QUEEN OF THE ADRIATIC We went straight through, leaving Charing Cross by the 2.20 which has carried so many happy travellers away from London through the smiling valleys of Kent. Were I a poet, I would address an ode to that romantic liberating train. It was after midnight on the following day when we drew up at last at Venice, tired and dusty and hungry and stained and not a little wondering why we had left London. But the next few minutes set that right, for all our weariness rolled away as we sat in the gondola under a soft starry sky, and watched the lights in the water, and heard the porters in fluent altercation, and at last got away and began to thread the narrow canal to Danieli's, where we were staying for that night. The next morning we moved on, by Dollie's advice, to the large hotel by the landing-stage at the Lido. I will not say that there are no mosquitoes--zanzare--there, but I am prepared to admit that the manager's theory is correct, and that we brought them with us from Venice. The secret of the peculiar buoyancy of the Lido waters I do not know; but they are wonderful. "Like bathing in champagne," Alderley said; and that, though a vile sophisticated simile, comes near the mark. Other sands may be gayer; but for its gift of exuberant gladness the Lido comes first. Drusilla's face, as we met, on our way to the sea down the wooden gangway, on the first afternoon, an Italian gentleman clad almost entirely in his own hair, was worth its weight in kodak films. "Why can't he wear a bath towel like Kent and father?" she asked indignantly. "Because he's an Italian," was Naomi's unanswerable reply, which, however Drusilla may have resented its insufficiency then, she was bound to agree with later; for the sea was full of such shameless happy monsters and their ladies, gambolling in the waves with both feet planted firmly and frankly on the bed of the ocean, and none of the Briton's shame at being found out no swimmer or any of his acrobatic efforts to convey to the shore an illusion of buoyancy. Perhaps, when all is said, the profoundest difference between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin is the Latin's indifference to public opinion. There is no true civilisation without it--if by civilisation is meant the art of enjoying life.