Nevil read on, distrustful of the perspicuity of his own ideas.
'Ah, but,' said she, 'when these Venetians were rough men, chanting like our Huguenots, how cold it must have been here!' She hoped she was not very wrong in preferring the times of the great Venetian painters and martial doges to that period of faith and stone-cutting.

What was done then might be beautiful, but the life was monotonous; she insisted that it was Huguenot; harsh, nasal, sombre, insolent, self-sufficient.

Her eyes lightened for the flashing colours and pageantries, and the threads of desperate adventure crossing the Rii to this and that palace-door and balcony, like faint blood-streaks; the times of Venice in full flower.

She reasoned against the hard eloquent Englishman of the books.

'But we are known by our fruits, are we not?
and the Venice I admire was surely the fruit of these stonecutters chanting hymns of faith; it could not but be: and if it deserved, as he says, to die disgraced, I think we should go back to them and ask them whether their minds were as pure and holy as he supposes.' Her French wits would not be subdued.