onsular
dignity. If the visits ended, as they often did, in a turn on the Grand
Canal, and an ice in the Piazza, they appealed to the imagination of more
sophisticated witnesses, who decided that the young American girl had
inherited the millions of the sick lady, and become the betrothed of the
vice-consul, and that they were thus passing the days of their engagement
in conformity to the American custom, however much at variance with that
of other civilizations.

This view of the affair was known to Maddalena, but not to Clementina,
who in those days went back in many things to the tradition of her life
at Middlemount. The vice-consul was of a tradition almost as simple, and
his longer experience set no very wide interval between them. It quickly
came to his telling her all about his dead wife and his married
daughters, and how, after his home was broken up, he thought he would
travel a little and see what that would do for him. He confessed that it
had not done much; he was always homesick, and he was ready to go as soon
as the President sent out a consul to take his job off his hands. He said
that he had not enjoyed himself so much since he came to Venice as he was
doing now, and that he did not know what he should do if Clementina first
got her call home. He betrayed no curiosity as to the peculiar
circumstances of her stay, but affected to regard it as something quite
normal, and he watched over her in every way with a fatherly as well as
an official vigilance which never degenerated into the semblance of any
other feeling. Clementina rested in his care in entire security. The
world had quite fallen from her, or so much of it as she had seen at
Florence, and in her indifference she lapsed into life as it was in the
time before that with a tender renewal of her allegiance to it. There was
nothing in the conversation of the vice-consul to distract her from this;
and she said and did the things at Venice that she used to do at
Middlemount, as nearly as she could; to make the days of waiting pass
more quickly, she tried to serve herself in ways that scandalized the
proud affection of Maddalena. It was not fit for the signorina to make
her bed or sweep her room; she might sew and knit if she would; but these
other things were for servants like herself. She continued in the faith
of Clementina's gentility, and saw her always as she had seen her first
in the brief hour of her social splendor in Florence. Clementina tried t