A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories | Page 3

Elmores were not quite
able to decide whether the pause of feeling at which they arrived was
through their own defect or not. Much was to be laid to the difference
of race, religion, and education; but something, they feared, to the
personal vapidity of acquaintances whose meridional liveliness made
them yawn, and in whose society they did not always find
compensation for the sacrifices they made for it.
"But it is right," said Elmore. "It would be a sort of treason to associate
with the Austrians. We owe it to the Venetians to let them see that our
feelings are with them."
"Yes," said his wife pensively.
"And it is better for us, as Americans abroad, during this war, to be
retired."
"Well, we are retired," said Mrs. Elmore.
"Yes, there is no doubt of that," he returned.
They laughed, and made what they could of chance American
acquaintances at the caffès. Elmore had his history to occupy him, and
doubtless he could not understand how heavy the time hung upon his
wife's hands. They went often to the theatre, and every evening they

went to the Piazza, and ate an ice at Florian's. This was certainly
amusement; and routine was so pleasant to his scholarly temperament
that he enjoyed merely that. He made a point of admitting his wife as
much as possible into his intellectual life; he read her his notes as fast
as he made them, and he consulted her upon the management of his
theme, which, as his research extended, he found so vast that he was
forced to decide upon a much lighter treatment than he had at first
intended. He had resolved upon a history which should be presented in
a series of biographical studies, and he was so much interested in this
conclusion, and so charmed with the advantages of the form as they
developed themselves, that he began to lose the sense of social dulness,
and ceased to imagine it in his wife.
A sort of indolence of the sensibilities, in fact, enabled him to endure
ennui that made her frantic, and he was often deeply bored without
knowing it at the time, or without a reasoned suffering. He suffered as a
child suffers, simply, almost ignorantly: it was upon reflection that his
nerves began to quiver with retroactive anguish. He was also able to
idealize the situation when his wife no longer even wished to do so. His
fancy cast a poetry about these Venetian friends, whose conversation
displayed the occasional sparkle of Ollendorff-English on a dark
ground of lagoon-Italian, and whose vivid smiling and gesticulation she
wearied herself in hospitable efforts to outdo. To his eyes their historic
past clothed them with its interest, and the long patience of their hope
and hatred under foreign rule ennobled them, while to hers they were
too often only tiresome visitors, whose powers of silence and of
eloquence were alike to be dreaded. It did not console her as it did her
husband to reflect that they probably bored the Italians as much in their
turn. When a young man, very sympathetic for literature and the
Americans, spent an evening, as it seemed to her, in crying nothing but
"Per Bácco!" she owned that she liked better his oppressor, who once
came by chance, in the figure of a young lieutenant, and who
unbuckled his wife, as he called his sword, and, putting her in a corner,
sat up on a chair in the middle of the room and sang like a bird, and
then told ghost-stories. The songs were out of Heine, and they
reminded her of her girlish enthusiasm for German. Elmore was
troubled at the lieutenant's visit, and feared it would cost them all their

Italian friends; but she said boldly that she did not care; and she never
even tried to believe that the life they saw in Venice was comparable to
that of their little college town at home, with its teas and picnics, and
simple, easy social gayeties. There she had been a power in her way;
she had entertained, and had helped to make some matches: but the
Venetians ate nothing, and as for young people, they never saw each
other but by stealth, and their matches were made by their parents on a
money-basis. She could not adapt herself to this foreign life; it puzzled
her, and her husband's conformity seemed to estrange them, as far as it
went. It took away her spirit, and she grew listless and dull. Even the
history began to lose its interest in her eyes; she doubted if the annals
of such a people as she saw about her could ever be popular.
There were other things to make them melancholy in their exile. The
war at home was going