Densher became aware, afresh, that he disliked his hotel—and all the more promptly¹ that he had had occasion of old to make the same discrimination. The establishment, choked at that season with the polyglot² herd³, cockneys of all climes, mainly German, mainly American, mainly English, it appeared as the corresponding sensitive nerve was touched, sounded loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything but Italian, but Venetian. The Venetian was all a dialect, he knew; yet it was pure Attic⁴ beside some of the dialects at the bustling⁵ inn. It made, "abroad," both for his pleasure and his pain that he had to feel at almost any point how he had been through every thing before. He had been three or four times, in Venice, during other visits, through this pleasant irritation⁶ of paddling away—away from the concert of false notes in the vulgarised hall, away from the amiable⁷ American families and overfed German porters. He had in each case made terms for a lodging⁸ more private and not more costly⁹, and he recalled with tenderness these shabby but friendly asylums¹⁰, the windows of which he should easily know again in passing on canal or through campo. The shabbiest now failed of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the end of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to a small independent quartiere, far down the Grand Canal, which he had once occupied for a month with a sense of pomp and circumstance and yet also with a growth of initiation

分享到：