‘Gondoliere,’ called Lady Henry, ‘Dove il palazzo Labia?’ She waved her hand to the grey buildings and the cloudy skies. Emilio climbed out of the boat.

‘See how helpful he is,’ she commented. ‘He knows exactly what I mean.’ Walking, Emilio always looked like an upright torpedo, as though he had been released by a mechanical contrivance and would knock down the first obstacle he met, or explode.

‘We were fortunate to get him,’ she continued. ‘We only hold him by a legal fiction; we couldn’t hire him, he has been too popular, poor fellow, all the summer, and no doubt fears the stilettos of his friends. I tried my utmost, Henry, didn’t I, to shake his resolution. I spoke in every tongue, but he was deaf to them all. So we re-engage him at the end of each ride, which does just as well, and salves his troublesome conscience. To-morrow, alas, we must go.’

They had gone down a passage and reached a door, the sullen solidity of which was impaired by the decay and neglect of centuries. Emilio pulled at the rusty bell and listened.

‘Do you think,’ Lavinia said suddenly, ‘you could ask him to be our gondolier, Mamma’s and mine, when you’ve finished with him? Just for two days; we leave on Friday.’

‘Why, of course,’ Lady Henry said.

She conducted the negotiation in her voluble broken Italian, pointed at Lavinia, pointed at herself, overrode some objection, made light of some scruple, and finally, out of the welter of questions and replies, drew forth, all raw as it were and quivering, Emilio’s consent. Over his fierceness he looked a little sheepish, as though the unusual rapidity of his thoughts had outstripped his expression and left it disconnected, drolly representing an earlier mood.

The door opened and they climbed to the high formal room where Antony and Cleopatra, disembarking, stare at Antony and Cleopatra feasting.

They had tea at Florian’s, under a stormy sky.

‘Don’t you think,’ Lady Henry de Winton said, ‘Miss Johnstone ought to be told some of those charming things Caroline said about her? Such a rain of dewdrops,’ she added turning to Lavinia. ‘I think we know you well enough.’

‘Perhaps Miss Johnstone doesn’t like hearing the truth about herself,’ Lord Henry suggested.

‘Oh, but such a truth—one could only mind not hearing it. First of all there were the general directions. Do you remember, Henry? We were not to shock her.’

‘Caroline thought you were very easily shocked,’ said Lord Henry, diffidently.

‘She had the Puritan conscience—the only one left in America; she might have stepped out of Mrs. Field’s drawing-room.’

‘Really, we must talk to Miss Johnstone, not about her,’ said Lord Henry, and they pulled up their chairs, turning radiant faces to Lavinia.

‘And not Puritan, my dear,’ Lord Henry put in. ‘Fastidious, choosy.’

‘I accept the amendment. Anyhow you would feel a stain like a wound. Then there were your friends.’

‘What about them?’ Lavinia asked.

‘Oh, they were a very compact body, but they agreed in nothing except in liking you. Each one had a pedestal for you, and thought the others did not value you enough. And they were very exacting. They had a special standard for you; if you so much as wobbled, the news was written, telephoned and cabled, in fact universally discussed.’

‘And universally denied,’ Lord Henry said.

‘Of course. But where others might steal a horse, I gathered, you mightn’t look over the hedge.’

‘That was only because,’ Lord Henry gently took her up, ‘you never wanted to look over the hedge.’

‘Do you recognize yourself in the portrait, Miss Johnstone?’ Lady Henry asked.

‘Oh, Caroline!’ Lavinia groaned.

‘There’s more to come,’ Lady Henry pursued. ‘You were inwardly simple, outwardly sophisticated. When you talked about your friends you were never malicious and yet never dull. You were a good judge of character; no one could take you in.’

‘She said,’ Lord Henry interpolated, with charming solicitude, ‘that no one would want to.’

But his wife saw a further meaning in this well-meant gloss and repudiated it.

‘Nonsense, Henry: anyone would be delighted to take Miss Johnstone in: she must be the target of all bad characters. Caroline was praising her intelligence. There, you shall pay for interrupting me by completing the catalogue of her virtues: a formidable task.’

‘Oh no,’ he said, sure of his ground this time, bending upon Lavinia his bright, soft look: ‘an easy one. Your poise was what your friends most admired. You took the heat out of controversies; you were a rallying point; you made other people feel at their best; you ingeminated peace.’

‘How eloquent he is!’ Lady Henry murmured, shaking her head.

‘And yet,’ he went on, ‘you were a great responsibility, the only one they had. They would never let you get married; they would rush to the altar and forbid the banns. You were, you were,’ he concluded lamely, ‘their criterion of respectability: they couldn’t afford to lose you.’

Lavinia got up. Behind her St. Mark’s spread out opalescent in the dusk.

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘and thank you for this afternoon. I must go, but before I go will you tell me what vices Caroline said I had? I know her,’ she went on, looking down at them without a smile. ‘She must have mentioned some.’

They looked at each other in dismay.

‘Be fair,’ Lavinia said, turning away. ‘Think of the burden I carry, with all those recommendations round my neck.’

‘We didn’t mean to “give you a character”,’ Lord Henry’s voice stressed the inverted commas.

‘Couldn’t you,’ said Lavinia turning to them again, ‘take just a little bit of it away?’

Perhaps Lady Henry was stung by her ungraciousness. ‘Caroline did say,’ she pronounced judicially, ‘that she—that they all-wondered whether, perhaps, you weren’t self-deceived: that was what helped you to keep up.’

‘Not consciously deceived,’ Lord Henry said, ‘and they didn’t want you undeceived: it was their business to see you weren’t.’

They both rose. ‘Good-bye,’ said Lady Henry. ‘It’s been delightful meeting you. And may we subscribe to what Caroline said?’

Lavinia said they might.

Without much noticing where she went, she made her way over the iron bridge, past the great church of the Gesuati on to the Fondamenta delle Zattere. The causeway was thronged, chiefly it seemed by old women. Hard-faced but beautiful in the Venetian way, they moved through the mysterious twilight, themselves not mysterious at all. Even their loitering was purposeful. The long low crescent of the Giudecca enfolded the purple waters of the canal, shipping closed it on the east; but at the western end there was a gap which the level sun streamed through, a narrow strait, seeming narrower for the bulwark of a factory that defined its left-hand side. The sense of the open sea, so rare in Venice, came home to Lavinia now; she felt the gap to be a wound in the side of the city, a gash in its completeness, a false word in the incantation of its spell. She fixed her eyes on it hopefully. She was conscious of a sort of drift going by her towards the sea, not a movement of the atmosphere, but an effluence of Venice. It was as though the beauty of the town had nourished itself too long and become its own poison; and at this hour the inflammation sighed itself away. Lavinia longed to let something go from her into the drift, something that also was an inflammation of beauty and would surely join its kind. The healing gale plucked at it, caressed it, and disowned it. The sun, pierced by a gigantic post, disappeared into the sea, and at the same moment the black mass of the Bombay liner detached itself from the wharf, moved slowly across the opening and settled there. The canal was sealed from end to end.

The night was very hot. Lavinia walked to the door of the hotel that opened on the canal and leaned against the door-post, looking out. Voices began to reach her; she recognized the tones, but the intonations seemed different.