Marietta leaned back under the cool, dark ‘felse,’ and her hands lay idly in her lap.  She felt that she was helpless, because she was indifferent, and that she could even now have changed the course of her destiny if she had cared to make the effort.  There was no reason for making any.  She did not believe that she had really loved Zorzi after all, and if she had, it seemed to-day quite impossible that she should ever have married him.  He was nothing but a waif, a half-nameless servant, a stranger predestined to a poor and obscure life.  As she inwardly repeated some of these considerations, she felt a little thrust of remorse for trying to look down on him as impossibly far below her own station, and a small voice told her that he was an artist, and that if he had chanced to be born in Venice he would have been as good as her brothers.

The future stretched out before her in a sort of dull magnificence that did not in the least appeal to her simple nature.  She could not tell why she had despised Jacopo Contarini from the moment she looked into his beautiful eyes.  Happily women are not expected to explain why they sometimes judge rightly at first sight, when a wise man is absurdly deceived.  Marietta did not understand Jacopo, and she easily fancied that because her own character was the stronger she should rule him as easily as she managed Nella.  It did not occur to her that he was already under the domination of another woman, who might prove to be quite as strong as she.  What she saw was the weakness in his eyes and mouth.  With such a man, she thought, there was little to fear; but there was nothing to love.  If she asked, he would give, if she opposed him, he would surrender, if she lost her temper and commanded, he would obey with petulant docility.  She should be obliged to take refuge in vanity in order to get any satisfaction out of her life, and she was not naturally vain.  The luxuries of those days were familiar to her from her childhood.  Though she had not lived in a palace, she had been brought up in a house that was not unlike one, she ate off silver plates and drank from glasses that were masterpieces of her father’s art, she had coffers full of silks and satins, and fine linen embroidered with gold thread, there was always gold and silver in her little wallet-purse when she wanted anything or wished to give to the poor, she was waited on by a maid of her own like any fine lady of Venice, and there were a score of idle servants in a house where there were only two masters—­there was nothing which Contarini could give her that would be more than a little useless exaggeration of what she had already.  She had no particular desire to show herself unveiled to the world, as married women did, and she was not especially attracted by the idea of becoming one of them.  She had been brought up alone, she had acquired tastes which other women had not, and which would no longer be satisfied in her married life, she loved the glass-house, she delighted in taking a blow-pipe herself and making small objects which she decorated as she pleased, she felt a lively interest in her father’s experiments, she enjoyed the atmosphere of his wisdom though it was occasionally disturbed by the foolish little storms of his hot temper.  And until now, she had liked to be often with Zorzi.