Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared aesthetic appreciation threads all that time.Our honeymoon was no exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help us out.It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the sensuous note.Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of the lagoons.We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be glorious freedoms.Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her previous Italian journey--fear of the mosquito had driven her mother across Italy to the westward route--and now she could fill up her gaps and see the Titians and Paul Veroneses she already knew in colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St.George series delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.
But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a thousand memories of her.I can see her now, her long body drooping a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm.I can hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless satisfaction these things gave her.
Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated person with whom I had ever come into close contact.She was cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of these things.She was passive, and I am active.She did not simply and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and lectures and all the organisation of beautiful things than she did in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to it.Now a thing ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points me out its merits.Beauty is the salt of life, but I take my beauty as a wild beast gets its salt, as a constituent of the meal....
And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more beautiful than any picture....
So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases and such-like things, and my brains were busy all the time with such things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent, New York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned to London, with the development of a theory of Margaret.
Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and destroyed those two independent ways of thinking about her that had gone on in my mind hitherto.Suddenly she had become very near to me, and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England.The judgments and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles away from my life, had now to be altogether revised.Trifling things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and stammered a little in talking, it didn't really mean that an exquisite significance struggled for utterance.
We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly.In the afternoon, unless we were making a day-long excursion in a gondola, Margaret would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English newspapers, and then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into the little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's.
