She looked out over her flowers.  The door of the glass-house was open now, and the burly porter was sweeping; she could hear the cypress broom on the flagstones inside, and presently it appeared in sight while the porter was still invisible, and it whisked out a mixture of black dust and bread crumbs and bits of green salad leaves, and the old man came out and swept everything across the footway into the canal.  As he turned to go back, the workmen came trooping across the bridge to the furnaces—­pale men with intent faces, very different from ordinary working people.  For each called himself an artist, and was one; and each knew that so far as the law was concerned the proudest noble in Venice could marry his daughter without the least derogation from patrician dignity.  The workmen differed from her own father not in station, but only in the degree of their prosperity.

If Zorzi could ever have been one of them the rest would have been simple enough.  But he could not, any more than a black man could turn white at will.  There was no evasion of law by which a man not born a Venetian could ever be a glass-blower, or could ever acquire the privileges possessed from birth by one of those shabby, pale young men who were crowding past the porter to go to their hard day’s work.  Yet dexterous as they were, there was not one that had his skill, there was not one that could compare with him as an artist, as a workman, as a man.  No Indian caste, no ancient nobility, no mystic priesthood ever set up a barrier so impassable between itself and the outer world as that which defended the glass-blowers of Murano for centuries against all who wished to be initiated.  Even the boys who fed the fires all night were of the calling, and by and by would become workmen, and perhaps masters, legally almost the equals of the splendid nobles who sat in the Grand Council over there in Venice.

Zorzi’s very existence was an anomaly.  He had no social right to be what he was, and he knew it when he called himself a servant, for the cruel law would not allow him to be anything else so long as he helped Angelo Beroviero.

Suddenly, while Marietta watched the men, Zorzi was there among them, coming out as they went in.  He must have risen early, she thought, for she did not know that he had slept in the laboratory.  He looked pale and thin as he flattened himself against the door-post to let a workman pass, and then slipped out himself.  No one greeted him, even by a nod.  Marietta knew that they hated him because he was in her father’s confidence; and somehow, instead of pitying him, she was glad.

It seemed natural that he should not be one of them, that he should pass them with quiet indifference and that they should feel for him the instinctive dislike which most inferiors feel for those above them.  Doubtless, they looked down upon him, or told themselves that they did; but in their hearts they knew that a man with such a face was born to be their teacher and their master, and the girl was proud of him.  He treated them with more civility than they bestowed on him, but it was the courtesy of a superior who would not assert himself, who would scorn to thrust himself forward or in any way to claim what was his by right, if it were not freely offered.  Marietta drew back a little, so that she could just see him between the flowers, without being seen.