‘But whatever you do, Lavinia, don’t make your plight fifty times worse by dragging morality into it. I suspect you of examining your conscience, chalking up black marks against yourself, wearing a Scarlet Letter and generally working yourself into a state. Put all such notions from you. The whole thing is a question of convenience. It arises constantly, it is not at all serious. Obviously you can’t marry the man; he is probably married already, and has a large family nearly as old as himself: they marry very young. If you were anyone else you might have him as a lover. I shouldn’t advise it, but with reasonable precautions it could be successfully carried through. But really, Lavinia, for you to have a cavalier servente of that kind would be the greatest folly; you would reproach yourself and feel you had done wrong. And it’s not a question of right and wrong, as I said: only a child of the ‘fifties would think it was. So good-bye Lavinia, and if you can bring me a snapshot of him we will laugh over it together.
With love,
Elizabeth Templeman.’
Lavinia read the letter with relief, with irritation, finally, without emotion of any kind. It was soothing to have her situation made light of; it was irritating to have it made fun of. But in proposing a solution based on reason Miss Templeman had missed the mark altogether, while her appeal to convention added another to Lavinia’s store of terrors. She could face the reproaches of her friends, the intimate disapproval of her conscience; they were part of her ordinary life. But the enmity of convention was outside her experience, for she had always been its ally, marched in its van. She could not placate it because it was implacable; its function was to disapprove.
The Evanses had gone, Stephen had gone, the Kolynopulos had gone, the de Wintons had gone; Elizabeth had failed to come, and Mrs. Johnstone would not rise till noon. Lavinia was alone.
Emilio did not desert her; he came in all his finery, he was delighted to see her. Stepping into the gondola Lavinia felt almost satisfied. It was a prize she had fought for against odds during a fortnight, and at last it was hers. ‘Comandi, Signorina?’ Emilio said, slowly moving his oar backwards and forwards. ‘Am I his Anthea?’ thought Lavinia. ‘Can I command him anything?’ But she only suggested they should go to San Salvatore. ‘Chiesa molto bella,’ she hazarded. ‘Si, si,’ returned Emilio, ‘e molto antica.’ That was the sort of conversation she liked, so easy, like fitting together two halves of a proverb. She felt deliriously weary. Suddenly she heard a shout. Emilio answered it, more loquaciously than was his wont. She looked up: it was only a passing gondolier, saying good-morning. Another shout. This time a whole sentence followed, in those clipped syllables which Lavinia could never catch. Emilio ceased rowing and answered at length, speaking in short bursts and with great conviction. A minute later a similar, even longer, interchange took place. The whole army of gondoliers seemed to take an interest in Emilio, to know his business and to be congratulating him on some success. Suddenly it seemed to Lavinia that from every pavement, traghetto, doorstep, and window a fire of enquiries was being directed upon her gondolier; and the enquirers all looked at her.
‘It’s my imagination,’ she thought; but in the afternoon the same thing happened again; it was like a nightmare. Convention, even Venetian convention, was showing its teeth, growling through the walls of its glass house. Lavinia was seized with a contempt for all these people, mopping and mowing and poking their noses into other people’s business. ‘What are they,’ she thought, ‘this population of Lascars and Dagoes?’ For a moment she felt Emilio to belong to them, a rift opened between her and him: she saw him as it were through the wrong end of a telescope, minute, insignificant, menial, not worth a thought. In his place appeared all the generations of the Johnstones, sincere, simple, grave from the performance of municipal and even higher functions, servants of their own time, benefactors of the time to come.
They were the people upon whom America had depended; America owed everything to them. From the sixteen-thirties when they arrived until the beginnings of vulgarization in the eighteen-eighties, for two hundred and fifty years they had persisted, an aristocracy unconscious of its own aristocratic principle, homely, solid, and affluent. If they remembered their descent—and Lavinia could recollect every generation of hers—they remembered it historically, not personally: the matter of genealogy was common knowledge: it was a bond to hold them together, not a standard for others to fall short of. It was domestic, this society to which they belonged, it was respectable, it was as democratic as an aristocracy could well be. And still, though threatened on all sides by an undifferentiated plutocracy, it kept its character, it preserved its primness, its scrupulosity, its air of something home-made and old-fashioned, without gloss or glitter. The lives of rich people now-a-days tended to follow the line of least resistance. They could go where they wanted, see what they wanted, do what they wanted; but the range of their desires was miserably contracted; with them personality was a mere drop in the bucket of prosperity. If they possessed a Gainsborough, they only possessed a name. ‘But if we have a Gainsborough,’ Lavinia mused, ‘we are not thereby debarred cherishing the lines of the family tea-pot; and it would hurt me more to lose my grandmother’s brooch than my pearl necklace.’ ‘That is it,’ she continued, elated, feeling herself necessary to civilization: ‘we have not lost touch with small things although we have had experience of great affairs; we can still discriminate, we still have an intimacy that does not need to wear its heart upon its sleeve or barter its secrets in the open market.’ Higher and higher mounted the tide of her self-complacency. For days the mood had been a stranger to her; now she encouraged it, indulged it, exulted in it, thinking, in her buoyancy, it would never leave her.
‘We didn’t take things lightly,’ she boasted, ‘we made life hard for ourselves. We thought that prosperity followed a good conscience, not, as they think now, that a good conscience follows prosperity. We did not find an excuse for wickedness in high places.’ Unaccountably the rhythm of her thought faltered; it had felt itself free of the heavens, but it was singed, and drooped earthward with damaged wing. ‘If Hester Prynne had lived in Venice,’ she thought, ‘she needn’t have stood in the pillory.’ For a moment she wished that Hawthorne’s heroine could have found a country more congenial to her temperament. It was my ancestors who punished her,’ she thought. ‘They had to: they had to stick at something. One must mind something, or else the savour goes out of life, and it stinks.’ She glanced uneasily round the room. It had taken back its friendship and had an air of lying in wait for her to disgrace herself. ‘Take that,’ she muttered, slamming the wardrobe door. But it swung back at her, as though something inside wanted to have a look. ‘All right,’ she threatened, ‘gim-crack stuff in a paste-board palazzo. At home, if I shut a door, it shuts.’ But the brave words didn’t convince her, and when she tried to visualize her home, she couldn’t. The breakdown in her imaginative faculty alarmed her. Suppose that, for the remainder of her life, when she wanted to evoke an image, it wouldn’t come? Tentatively, not committing herself to too great an effort, she trained her mind’s eye upon the portrait of her great-aunt, Sophia. There was a blur, then a blank: and in turn, as she called upon them, each of the portraits evaded her summons. ‘It is unkind of you,’ she murmured, almost in tears, ‘after I have given you all such a good character.’ Then suddenly, as her mind relaxed, the images she had striven for flooded uncontrollably into it, bending their disapproving stare upon her, proclaiming their hostility.