I cannot tell you.
She was like Titian's Venus. Go and look at it--she who plays with the
little dog in the Tribune at Pitti: that one I mean. With all that
beauty, half disclosed like the bud of a pomegranate-flower, she had
been given to Taddeo Marchioni, and here for seven years she had dwelt,
shut in by stone walls.

Living so, a woman becomes a saint or a devil. Taddeo Marchioni forgot
or never knew that. He left her in his chamber as he left the figures of
the tapestry, till her bloom should fade like theirs, and time write
wrinkles on her as it wove webs on them. He forgot! he forgot! He was
old and slow of blood and feeble of sight: she was scarcely beautiful to
him. There were a few poor peasants near, and a priest as old as Taddeo
Marchioni was; and though Orte was within five miles, the sour and
jealous temper of her husband shut her up in that prison-house as Pia
Tolomei was shut in the house of death in the Maremma.

That night I watched impatient for the dawn. Impatient I watched the
daybreak deepen into day. All the loveliness of that change was lost on
me: I only counted the hours in restless haste. Poor fools! our hours
are in sum so few, and yet we for ever wish them shorter, and fling
them, scarcely used, behind us roughly, as a child flings his broken
toys.

The sultry morning was broad and bright over the land before I dared
take up such fish as had entered my girella in the night and bend my
steps to Sant' Aloisa. Fever-mists hung over the cane-brakes and the
reedy swamps; the earth was baked and cracked; everything looked
thirsty, withered, pallid, dull, decaying: in the heats of August it is
always so desolate wherever Tiber rolls. "Marchioni is out," said the
old brown crone whom I had seen the day before. "But come in: bring your
fish to Madama Flavia."

It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the
Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men--it had as many
chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome--but this old woman was all
the servitor it had, and in the grand old hall, with sculptured shields
upon the columns of it and Umbrian frescoes in the roof, she spread
their board and brought them their onion-soup and their dish of _pasta_,
and while they ate it looked on and muttered her talk and twirled her
distaff, day after day, year after year, the same. Life is homely and
frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of life in these grand old
places are like