There were a few shrubs in it, two or three rose-bushes and a small
plane-tree. Zorzi, who had been born and brought up in the country, had
made a couple of flower-beds, edged with refuse fragments of coloured
and iridescent slag, and he had planted such common flowers as he could
make grow in such a place, watering them from a disused rain-water
cistern that was supposed to have been poisoned long ago. Here Marietta
often sat in the shade, when the laboratory was too close and hot, and
when the time was at hand during which even the men would not be able to
work on account of the heat, and the furnace would be put out and
repaired, and every one would be set to making the delicate clay pots in
which the glass was to be melted. Marietta could sit silent and
motionless in her seat under the plane-tree for a long time when she was
thinking, and she never told any one her thoughts.
She was not unlike her father in looks, and that was doubtless the
reason why he assumed that she must be like him in character. No one
would have said that she was handsome, but sometimes, when she smiled,
those who saw that rare expression in her face thought she was
beautiful. When it was gone, they said she was cold. Fortunately, her
hair was not red, as her father's had been or she might sometimes have
seemed positively ugly; it was of that deep ruddy, golden brown that one
may often see in Venice still, and there was an abundance of it, though
it was drawn straight back from her white forehead and braided into the
smallest possible space, in the fashion of that time.
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