e safe in public or
under lock and key, but that there was no salvation for them between
those two extremes.

But, in the eyes of Pignaver, a musician was not a man, any more than a
servant or a gondolier could be. Where a Venetian lady was concerned,
nothing was a man that had not a seat in the Grand Council; that was the
limit, below which the male population consisted of sexless creatures
like domestics, shopkeepers, and workmen.

Furthermore, the vanity of Pignaver raised him above all other
competitors as high as the Campanile stood above Saint Mark's and the
Ducal Palace, not to mention the rest of Venice, and the idea that
Ortensia, who had been informed that she was to be the wife of his
transcendently gifted and desirable self, could stoop to look at a
Sicilian music-master, would have struck him as superlatively comic,
though his sense of humour was imperfect, to say the least of it.

Even if the great man could have set aside all these considerations for
a moment, so as to look upon Stradella as a possible rival, he would
still have believed that the presence of Pina during the lessons was a
trustworthy safeguard against any 'accident to Ortensia's affections,'
as he would have expressed the danger. He had unbounded faith in Pina's
devotion to him and in her severity as a chaperon. On the rare
occasions when the young girl was allowed to leave the palace without
her uncle, Pina accompanied her in the gondola, and sometimes on foot as
far as the church of the Frari, where she went to confession once a
month; but, as a rule, she had her daily airing with the Senator
himself, meekly sitting on his left, and pretending to keep her eyes
fixed on an imaginary point directly ahead, as he insisted that she
must, lest she should look at any of the handsome young nobles who were
only too anxious to pass as near as possible on her side of the gondola.

For, though she was not eighteen years old, the reputation of her beauty
was already abroad; and as it was said that she was to inherit her
uncle's vast wealth, there were at least three hundred young gentlemen
of high degree who desired her now, since no one knew that the Senator
had determined to marry her himself. Their offers were constantly
presented to him, sometimes by their fathers or mothers, and sometimes
by ingenious elderly friends who undertook such negotiations for a
financial consideration. But Pignaver always returned the same answer,
politely expressi