rt was made, none the less, by the time she had
asked if the gentleman were below and had taken in the fact that he had
come up. He had followed the gondolier and was waiting at the top of
the staircase.

"I'll see him with pleasure." To which she added for her companion,
while Pasquale went off: "Mr. Merton Densher."

"Oh!" said Lord Mark--in a manner that, making it resound through the
great cool hall, might have carried it even to Densher's ear as a
judgement of his identity heard and noted once before

BOOK EIGHTH

I

Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his hotel--and all the
more promptly that he had had occasion of old to make the same
discrimination. The establishment, choked at that season with the
polyglot herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly German, mainly American,
mainly English, it appeared as the corresponding sensitive nerve was
touched, sounded loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything
but Italian, but Venetian. The Venetian was all a dialect, he knew; yet
it was pure Attic beside some of the dialects at the bustling inn. It
made, "abroad," both for his pleasure and his pain that he had to feel
at almost any point how he had been through every thing before. He had
been three or four times, in Venice, during other visits, through this
pleasant irritation of paddling away--away from the concert of false
notes in the vulgarised hall, away from the amiable American families
and overfed German porters. He had in each case made terms for a
lodging more private and not more costly, and he recalled with
tenderness these shabby but friendly asylums, the windows of which he
should easily know again in passing on canal or through campo. The
shabbiest now failed of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the
end of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to a small
independent _quartiere_, far down the Grand Canal, which he had once
occupied for a month with a sense of pomp and circumstance and yet also
with a growth of initiation into the homelier Venetian mysteries. The
humour of those days came back to him for an hour, and what further
befell in this interval, to be brief, was that, emerging on a traghetto
in sight of the recognised house, he made out on the green shutters of
his old, of his young windows the strips of white pasted paper that
figure in Venice as an invitation to tenants. This was in the course of
his very first walk apart, a walk replete with impressions