nettles and thistles set in an old majolica vase that
has had knights and angels painted on it. You know what I mean, you who
know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of Vittorio Carpaccio and of
Gentileo? They say that this is the life our Italy saw once in her
cities and her villas: that is the life she wants. Sometimes, when you
are all alone in these vast deserted places, the ghosts of all that
pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the living people for
these courts and halls.

"Madama Flavia will see the fish," said the old crone, and hobbled away.

Madama Flavia! How many times has Tiber heard such a name as that
breathed on a lover's mouth to the sigh of the mandoline, uttered in
revel or in combat, or as a poisoner whispered it stealing to mix the
drug with the wine in the goblet. Madama Flavia! All Italy seemed in
it--all love, all woe! There is a magic in some names.

Madama Flavia! Just such a woman as this it needs would be to fitly wear
such a name--a woman with low brows and eyes that burn, and a mouth like
the folded leaves that lie in the heart of a rose--a woman to kneel at
morn in the black shadows of the confessional, and to go down into the
crowd of masks at night and make men drunk with love.

"Madama Flavia!" The name (so much it said to me) halted stupidly on my
lips: I stood in her presence like a foolish creature. I never before
had lacked either courage or audacity: I trembled now. I had been awake
all the night, gazing at the dim, dusky pile of her roof as it rose out
from the olives black against the stars; and she knew it--she knew it
very well. That I saw in her face. And she was Madama Flavia, and I was
Pipistrello the juggler. What could I say to her? I could have fallen at
her feet and kissed her or killed her, but I could not speak. No doubt I
looked but a poor boor to her--a giant and a dolt.

She was leaning against a great old marble vase--leaning her hands on
it, and her chin on her hands. She had some red carnations in her
breast: their perfume came to me. She was surrounded by decay, dusty
desolation, the barrenness of a poverty that is drearier than any of the
poverty of the poor; but so might have looked Madama Lucrezia in those
old days when the Borgia was God's vicegerent.

At the haul of fish she never glanced: she gazed at me with meditation
in her eyes. "You are very strong," she said abruptly.

At that I could do no less than laugh. It was as if she had