to him was part of his punishment. Out in the square beyond
the _fondamenta_ that gave access to the land-gate of the palace, out
where the wind was higher, he fairly, with the thought of it, pulled
his umbrella closer down. It couldn't be, his consciousness, unseen
enough by others--the base predicament of having, by a concatenation,
just to _take_ such things: such things as the fact that one very acute
person in the world, whom he couldn't dispose of as an interested
scoundrel, enjoyed an opinion of him that there was no attacking, no
disproving, no (what was worst of all) even noticing. One had come to a
queer pass when a servant's opinion so mattered. Eugenio's would have
mattered even if, as founded on a low vision of appearances, it had
been quite wrong. It was the more disagreeable accordingly that the
vision of appearances was quite right, and yet was scarcely less low.

Such as it was, at any rate, Densher shook it off with the more
impatience that he was independently restless. He had to walk in spite
of weather, and he took his course, through crooked ways, to the
Piazza, where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here, in the
high arcade, half Venice was crowded close, while, on the Molo, at the
limit of the expanse, the old columns of the Saint Theodore and of the
Lion were the frame of a door wide open to the storm. It was odd for
him, as he moved, that it should have made such a difference--if the
difference wasn't only that the palace had for the first time failed of
a welcome. There was more, but it came from that; that gave the harsh
note and broke the spell. The wet and the cold were now to reckon with,
and it was to Densher precisely as if he had seen the obliteration, at
a stroke, of the margin on a faith in which they were all living. The
margin had been his name for it--for the thing that, though it had held
out, could bear no shock. The shock, in some form, had come, and he
wondered about it while, threading his way among loungers as vague as
himself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly on the rubbish in shops. There
were stretches of the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasy
now with the salt spray; and the whole place, in its huge elegance, the
grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail, was more than
ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned
and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. He brushed shoulders with
brown men whose hats askew, and