Usually on such occasions the conversation revolved around what they would do together and, as far as she was concerned, the country did not exist.
“Are you really suggesting that I should proclaim from a soap-box like the agitators in Hyde Park the whining and grumbling of a small minority who cannot get themselves heard otherwise?” he asked for the sake of argument.
“Are you quite sure it is a small minority?” Lucia replied. “From all I read before I left England and the little I have been able to read while we were in Venice, it appears to me that a very great number of people are most dissatisfied, however complacent the great landlords and those who sit in the House of Lords may be.”
If the Marquis had been attacked by one of the birds that flew round them in the harbour he could n
