A Venetian June

Colonel Steele, Uncle Dan to his nieces, has found himself in Venice once every five years for most of his adult life. One June he brings two of them, twenty-seven-year-old Pauline and twenty-year-old May Beverly, to see the city for the first time. What the girls take for a holiday of gondolas and churches is, for their uncle, something quieter: the widowed Signora Daymond is there. He asked her to marry him twenty-five years ago and was refused, and he knows he will ask again. Fuller holds both generations in view, playing the young people’s flirtations and first impressions against an older man’s long patience. G. P. Putnam’s Sons published it in 1896, a novel of manners from the high season of the American abroad, as attentive to its gondoliers as to its palaces.