The workmen differed from her own father not in station, but only in the degree of their prosperity.
If Zorzi could ever have been one of them the rest would have been simple enough.

But he could not, any more than a black man could turn white at will.

There was no evasion of law by which a man not born a Venetian could ever be a glass-blower, or could ever acquire the privileges possessed from birth by one of those shabby, pale young men who were crowding past the porter to go to their hard day's work.

Yet dexterous as they were, there was not one that had his skill, there was not one that could compare with him as an artist, as a workman, as a man.

No Indian caste, no ancient nobility, no mystic priesthood ever set up a barrier so impassable between itself and the outer world as that which defended the glass-blowers of Murano for centuries against all who wished to be initiated.