"

I sat on the sofa end and touched one of her little pink ears. She
has pretty ears. They were the first of things physical about her that
attracted me to her years ago in the Roman pension--they and the mass of
silken flax that is her hair, and her violet eyes.

"Did you learn that particular way of talking in Paris?" I asked.

She had the effrontery to say she was imitating me and that it was a
very good imitation indeed.

We talked about the book. I touched upon the great problem that requires
solution--the harmonising and justifying of the contradictory opposites
in Renaissance character: Fra Lippo Lippi breaking his own vows and
breaking a nun's for her; Perugino leading his money-grubbing, morose
life and painting ethereal saints and madonnas in his _bottega_, while
the Baglioni filled the streets outside with slaughter; Lorenzo de'
Medici bleeding literally and figuratively his fellow-citizens, going
from that occupation to his Platonic Academy and disputing on the
immortality of the soul, winding up with orgies of sensual depravity
with his boon companion Pulci, and all the time making himself an
historic name for statecraft; Pope Sixtus IV, at the very heart of the
Pazzi conspiracy to murder the Medici--

"And Pope Nicholas V when drunk ordering a man to be executed, and being
sorry for it when sober," said Judith.

It is wonderful how Judith, with her quite unspecialised knowledge of
history can now and then put her finger upon something vital. I have
been racking my brain and searching my library for the past two or three
days for an illustration of just that nature. I had not thought of it.
Here is Tomaso da Sarzana, a quiet, retired schoolmaster, like myself,
an editor of classical texts, a peaceful librarian of Cosmo de' Medici,
a scholar and a gentleman to the tips of his fingers; he is made Pope, a
King Log to save the cardinalate from a possible King Stork Colonna; the
Porcari conspiracy breaks out, is discovered and the conspirators are
hunted over Italy and put to death; a gentleman called Anguillara is
slightly inculpated; he is invited to Rome by Nicholas, and given
a safe-conduct; when he arrives the Pope is drunk (at least Stefano
Infessura, the contemporary diarist, says so); the next morning his
Holiness finds to his surprise and annoyance that the gentleman's head
has been cut off by his orders. It is an amazing tale. To realise
how amazing it is, one must picture the fantastic possib