Meanwhile the Dean was telling Jane about places of interest, such as Roman camps, in the neighbourhood. The Dean, like many deans, talked rather well. He thought Jane prettily attentive, and more educated than most young women, and that it was a pity she wore such an old-fashioned dress. He did not say so, but asked her if she had designed it from Carpaccio’s St. Ursula, and she said no, from an angel playing the timbrel by Jacopo Bellini in the Accademia. So after that they talked about Venice, and he said he must show her his photographs of it after dinner. “It must be a wonderful place for an artist,” he told her, and she agreed, and then they compared notes and found that he had stayed at the Hotel Europa, and had had a lovely view of the Giudecca and Santa Maria Maggiore from the windows (“most exquisite on a grey day”), and she had stayed in the flat of an artist friend, looking on to the Rio delle Beccarie, which is a _rio_ of the poor. Like Eileen and Nevill, they had eaten in different places; but, unlike London, Venice is a coherent whole, not rings within rings, so they could talk, albeit with reservations and a few cross purposes. The Dean liked talking about pictures, and Torcello, and Ruskin, and St. Mark’s, and the other things one talks about when one has been to Venice. Perhaps too he even wanted a little to hear her talk about them, feeling interested in the impressions of an artist. Jane was rather disappointingly simple and practical on these subjects; artists, like other experts, are apt to leave rhapsodies to the layman, and tacitly assume admiration of the beauty that is dilated on by the unprofessional. They are baffling people; the Dean remembered that about poor Wilson Gavin. While he thus held Jane’s attention, Eddy talked to Molly about skating, a subject in which both were keenly interested, Daphne sparred with Claude, and Arnold entertained Mrs. Oliver, whom he found a little _difficile_ and rather the _grande dame_. Frankly, Mrs. Oliver did not like Arnold, and he saw through her courtesy as easily as through Daphne’s rudeness. She thought him conceited (which he was), irreverent (which he was also), worldly (which he was not), and a bad influence over Eddy (and whether he was that depended on what you meant by “bad”).