But it must not be supposed that Mr. and Mrs. Carteret satisfied their romantic longings by receiving the more important visitors to Venice or (by what gave them perhaps greater pleasure) refusing to receive those who were less important. Their romanticism went further than the bounds of snobbery and super-snobbery in which to some extent it fulfilled itself.

Mr. Carteret had his pictures on the walls of the ante-room. He had no reason to be ashamed of them and when visitors praised them and asked him why he had given up painting—‘Oh don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t!’—he would exclaim, and make his usual excuse for having stopped painting when he began to mingle with the rich and great.

Mrs. Carteret owed no apologies to anyone. She did not feel the need to exhibit her rather laborious knowledge of foreign languages, accurate and impressive as it was, and acquired—who knows how?—in holes and corners of New York, or her considerable knowledge of art and literature which she perhaps felt was beneath her, to any so-and-so who had been admitted to her presence.

In her case, as in his, this was a kind of negative romanticism, the rich, cultured, high-born American keeping the profane, vulgar, at bay.

Yet true romanticism demands more than negation and disapproval: it demands a positive gesture, something creative, something to hand down to the ages.

It happened before my time, and how it happened I never knew, but rumour told me it happened this wise. Mr. and Mrs. Carteret gave an evening party after dinner in the height of summer, to which everyone who was anyone was invited.

Refreshments no doubt were served, perhaps under the light of gondola lanterns, antique and modern: I can imagine their ghostly glimmering.

As the warm evening drew to its close, and the mosquitoes began to make their unwelcome attentions, there was a sudden movement, and there emerged from among the bushes, towards and around the fountain, a rush, a displacement of air quite indescribable—and there, said the guests, who could none of them afterwards agree, were a nymph and a shepherd, representing Mrs. and Mr Carteret. For two or three minutes, hand in hand and foot by foot, they encircled the dim sub-aqueous shimmer of the fountain, frolicking and kicking their heels. Then other lights were turned on, fairy-lights away in the garden, and Mr. and Mrs. Carteret in a guise that was never agreed upon, ushered their guests out.

So no one ever knew for certain, though speculations were rife, what costumes Mr. and Mrs. Carteret had worn for their middle-aged pastoral idyll. Some went so far as to say they had worn nothing; while others said the whole thing was a hoax and the figures clothed or unclothed, that issued from the bushes and danced round the fountain had been hired by Mr. and Mrs. Carteret to give the impression of an old-time Venetian bal masqué.

Was this extraordinary exhibition the object of the party—to show Mr. and Mrs. Carteret in their primeval youth?

The guests never knew; they made their farewells and their exits not knowing what to say, and leaving the shepherd and the shepherdess in the darkness.

The incident was often referred to by their friends, but not by Mr. and Mrs. Carteret. They lived out, and outlived, their innate earlier romanticism and did not repeat the experiment. There were no more shepherds and shepherdesses in the garden (Palladio? Sansovino?). Only properly attired fashionable guests (with one exception) were entertained there.

Among the yearly visitors to the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo, was one who always escaped Mrs. Carteret’s lively censure. This was Princess X, who came from a distant mid-European country, but who sometimes deigned to set foot in Venice. For Mrs. Carteret, Princess X could do no wrong. In the early autumn I used to be warned, ‘Someone interesting is coming to stay with us. I hope you will be here.’ The ‘someone’ was never mentioned by name, but I knew who she was. Her sojourns at the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo were brief, but they were much prepared for and looked forward to. When the princess finally arrived after adequate arrangements had been made, she did something which Mrs. Carteret would not have tolerated in anyone else. She was at least half an hour late for every meal. Lateness was something Mrs. Carteret bitterly resented: as she sometimes said to a belated guest, ‘Better never than late.’ But not to Princess X, whose late appearances were designed to make an impression. Wearing her famous emeralds, and her fading beauty, she would walk into the ante-room, looking vaguely around her, as if time was of no consequence, and Mrs. Carteret would rise laboriously to her feet and her husband more agilely to his, to greet her.

‘Dear Princess!’

This was in the middle and late thirties, before the Abyssinian War, and Sanctions, which made relationships between our two countries increasingly difficult. Mr. and Mrs. Carteret, besides being by birth Americans, were old enough to be above the battle; they did not much care what happened so long as it did not happen to them in their secure peninsula of beauty. They were, if anything, for Mussolini who protected what they stood and reclined for. But the other Anglo-American inhabitants of Venice were not in such a happy case, and as the fatal year drew on, they also withdrew, as I did. Exactly what happened to the Carterets when war was declared I never knew. Rumours I did hear, many years later, when I came back to Venice. Mr. Carteret had retired to the South of France, where he died, leaving the Allied cause a large sum of money. Anna had predeceased him, perhaps in the first year of the war, perhaps before. We corresponded with each other until letters no longer reached their destination. Our fragile friendship was overwhelmed in the universal cataclysm.

When I went back after the war there were many changes: the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo had passed into other hands, hands as unlike those of its previous owners as could well be imagined. The suore (the nuns of Santa Chiara, that noble and austere sisterhood) had bought it, and could there be anything more unlike its present situation and meaning to the world outside than it had in the days of Mr. and Mrs. Carteret? The worldly and the other-worldly could not have been more violently contrasted. The only resemblance between its present and its former owners was the extreme difficulty of being received. The nuns, by rules ordained by their illustrious foundress, could not receive people from the outside world. Those who wanted admission had to have special reasons, religious passports so to speak, before they could be let in. In the Carterets’ day it had been just as difficult to obtain admittance; but how different were the obstacles then! Then they were purely social; now they were purely spiritual.

But, thought I, the revenant, as I walked along the extreme northern fondamenta of Venice, past the Madonna dell’ Orto with its wonderful Tintoretto, past the Sacco della Misericordia—hated by the gondoliers in bad weather—and looked down on the long curve of the Fondamenta Nuove—so beautiful, so sunless—and then up at the closed and shuttered windows of the palazzo—is it fair to think that Anna and James Carteret would have minded so much the idea of their cherished and lovely house being occupied by nuns?

Was it quite true that they stood for everything the nuns did not stand for?—for material and snobbish values, and above and beyond them, the values of art and literature, the aesthetic values which they never ceased to uphold and to proclaim?

Looking up at the dull, uninteresting façade of the place, I thought that never, never again even if the suore would receive me, would I venture into those rooms, where beauty had once reigned and which were now dormitories, refectories, toilets, and so on.