other to see Beroviero’s friends and relations, as they emerged from beneath the black ‘felse’ of their gondolas to enter the house.  In the hall the guests divided, and the men gathered in a large lower chamber, while the women went upstairs to offer their congratulations to Marietta, with many set compliments upon her beauty, her clothes and her jewels, and even with occasional flattering allusions to the vast dowry her husband was to receive with her.

She listened wearily, and her head ached more and more, so that she longed for the coolness of her own room and for Nella’s soothing chatter, to which she was so much accustomed that she missed it if the little brown woman chanced to be silent.

The sun went down and wax candles were brought, instead of the tall oil lamps that were used on ordinary days.  It grew hotter and hotter, the compliments of the ladies seemed more and more dull and stale, her mantle was heavy and even the gold circlet on her hair was a burden.  Worse than all, she knew that every minute was carrying her further and further into the dominion of the irrevocable whence she could never return.

She had looked at the palaces she had passed in Venice that morning, some in shadow, some in sunlight, some with gay faces and some grave, but all so different from the big old house in Murano, that she did not wish to live in them at all.  It would have been much easier to submit if she had been betrothed to a foreigner, a Roman, or a Florentine.  She had been told that Romans were all wicked and gloomy, and that Florentines were all wicked and gay.  That was what Nella had heard.  But in a sense they were free, for they probably did what was good in their own eyes, as wicked people often do.  Life in Venice was to be lived by rule, and everything that tasted of freedom was repressed by law.  If it pleased women to wear long trains the Council forbade them; if they took refuge in long sleeves, thrown back over their shoulders, a law was passed which set a measure and a pattern for all sleeves that might ever be worn.  If a few rich men indulged their fancy in the decoration of their gondolas, now that riding was out of fashion, the Council immediately determined that gondolas should be black and that they should only be gilt and adorned inside.  As for freedom, if any one talked of it he was immediately tortured until he retracted all his errors, and was then promptly beheaded for fear that he should fall again into the same mistake.  Nella said so, and told hideous tales of the things that had been done to innocent men in the little room behind the Council chamber in the Palace.  Besides, if one talked of justice, there was Zorzi’s case to prove that there was no justice at all in Venetian law.  Marietta suddenly wished that she were wicked, like the Romans and the Florentines; and even when she reflected that it was a sin to wish that one were bad, she was not properly repentant, because she had a very vague notion of what wickedness really was.  Righteousness seemed just now to consist in being smothered in heavy clothes, in a horribly hot room, while respectable women of all ages, fat, thin, fair, red-haired, dark, ugly and handsome, all chattered at her and overwhelmed her with nauseous flattery.