They are so foreign, so slender and straight, so sad.
Their faces are capable of animation, but their prevailing expression is melancholy.

Why is this?
Is it because they know how secondary a place woman holds in this city of well-nourished, self-satisfied men?
Is it that they know that a girl's life is so brief: one day as supple and active as they are now and the next a crone?
For it is one of the tragedies that the Venetian atmosphere so rapidly ages women.
But in their prime the Venetian girls in the black shawls are distinguished indeed, and there was not a little sagacity in the remark to me by an observer who said that, were they wise, all women would adopt a uniform.

One has often thought this, in London, when a nurse in blue or grey passes refreshingly along a pavement made bizarre by expensive and foolish fashions; one realizes it even more in Venice.
Most of these girls have dark or black hair.

The famous red hair of Venetian women is rarely seen out of pictures.
Round and round goes the chattering contented crowd, while every table at each of the four cafes, Florian's and the Aurora, the Quadri and the Ortes Rosa, swells the noise.

Now and then the music, or the ordinary murmur of the Square in the long intervals, is broken by the noisy rattle of a descending shop shutter, or the hour is struck by the Merceria clock's bronze giants; now and then a pigeon crosses the sky and shows luminous where the light strikes its breast; now and then a feather flutters from a window ledge, great bats flit up and down, and the mosquitoes shrill in one's ear.