Be that as it may, the thing happened the winter we were at Venice. Madame Welstoke was in her heyday then, with plenty of money to give dinners for the little crowd that was made up out of dark-brown society--the old men who'd tell of nearly reaching greatness and the like of that, with champagne running from the corners of their eyes and their voices cracking with all the bad-spent years. And there were fat, jeweled women, too, hanging on alimony or adventure, and middle-aged men from this country, who had left New York or Philadelphia for one reason or another of their own, and talked about rates of interest and whistled tunes that were popular in the United States in the seventies, and had a word or two for my shoulders. "Be careful how you talk too much," old Welstoke would say. "It's a very fair presentment you make with a bit of rouge, and a hairdresser, and keeping your big hands under the table as much as possible. Whatever you do, listen, and be on your guard, if the conversation runs to letters or music. One way to be educated is to be silent!" Perhaps she laid it on so heavy about my lack of "finish," as she called it, that when my one moment came to speak and say in my plain way a word or two, it gagged me in my throat and would not slide out. In those days a French Jew, named Vorpin, had a place just off the Grand Canal, called "Trois Folies," and by waiting till mid-evening for dinner, we could find the cafe well-nigh empty. The truth was I went there often alone when a fit of depression was on me, and it was no wonder these fits came. A week of idleness, taken by a person who comes from my class, and should be working eight and ten hours a day, is a misfortune often longed for and seldom recognized when it has come. Little did I think that evening, of which you will hear, that what happened there was to have its hold on Julianna Colfax, who had not then been thought of as coming into the terrible clutches of that which has followed us like a skulk o' night. The cafe was long, and longer yet with its gilt mirrors on the white walls and its row of empty gilded chairs, and I found a table in the corner. Perhaps a man and woman or two was there, either too late or too early for the gayeties that went on. I have forgotten. I only know that the sound of lapping water came in through the lattice beside my table and a breeze, too, that cooled my bare neck and would not cool my head, which was full of thoughts of my days in the old garden in the Isle of Wight and my mother's song and the colored crayon of my father, looking very stern, and hanging over the green old china vases on the mantel. I believe the first thing that made me look up was a crash of glass, of crockery, the exclamation of the waiters, and running feet. "So here is where they boast of excitement?" roared a thick voice. "And yet a man must make it himself." The waiters had surrounded him, whoever he was, and I could not see him then.