I'm sure she would like you to call, and I hope she will like the gondola." "Oh, she will like it," Peter assured Miss Dassonville as he helped her out in front of the Casa Frolli; "it will remind her of a rocking chair." Mrs.Merrithew did like the gondola; she liked everything:--the spacious dark, the scudding forms like frightened swans, the sound of singing on the water, the soft bulks of foliage that overhung them in the narrow _calle_, the soundless hatchet-faced prows that rounded on them from behind dim palaces; and she liked the gondola so much that she asked Peter "right out" what it cost him.
"We would have taken one ourselves," she explained without waiting, "only we didn't feel able to afford it.

Fifty francs a week they wanted to charge us, but maybe that was because we were Americans; they think Americans can do everything over here.

But I suppose you get yours cheap at the hotel ?" "Oh, much cheaper." "How much ?" "Forty francs," hazarded Peter.

"I'm sure I could get you one for that.
Unless ...

if you don't mind...." He made what he hadn't done yet under any circumstances, a case out of his broken health to explain how by not getting up very early and by taking some prescribed exercise, Giuseppe and the gondola had to lie unused half the mornings, which was very bad for them....