perfect keeping with the loves of a duchess
and a handsome youth, for they are a poem far removed from the coarse
ends of brutal nature.

Any one with a soul for fantasy would have looked to see, on one of
those noble flights of steps, standing by a vase with medallions in
bas-relief, a negro boy swathed about the loins with scarlet stuff, and
holding in one hand a parasol over the Duchess' head, and in the other
the train of her long skirt, while she listened to Emilio Memmi. And
how far grander the Venetian would have looked in such a dress as the
Senators wore whom Titian painted.

But alas! in this fairy palace, not unlike that of the Peschieri at
Genoa, the Duchess Cataneo obeyed the edicts of Victorine and the Paris
fashions. She had on a muslin dress and broad straw hat, pretty shot
silk shoes, thread lace stockings that a breath of air would have blown
away; and over her shoulders a black lace shawl. But the thing which no
one could ever understand in Paris, where women are sheathed in their
dresses as a dragon-fly is cased in its annular armor, was the perfect
freedom with which this lovely daughter of Tuscany wore her French
attire; she had Italianized it. A Frenchwoman treats her shirt with the
greatest seriousness; an Italian never thinks about it; she does not
attempt self-protection by some prim glance, for she knows that she is
safe in that of a devoted love, a passion as sacred and serious in her
eyes as in those of others.

At eleven in the forenoon, after a walk, and by the side of a table
still strewn with the remains of an elegant breakfast, the Duchess,
lounging in an easy-chair, left her lover the master of these muslin
draperies, without a frown each time he moved. Emilio, seated at her
side, held one of her hands between his, gazing at her with utter
absorption. Ask not whether they loved; they loved only too well. They
were not reading out of the same book, like Paolo and Francesca; far
from it, Emilio dared not say: "Let us read." The gleam of those eyes,
those glistening gray irises streaked with threads of gold that started
from the centre like rifts of light, giving her gaze a soft, star-like
radiance, thrilled him with nervous rapture that was almost a spasm.
Sometimes the mere sight of the splendid black hair that crowned the
adored head, bound by a simple gold fillet, and falling in satin tresses
on each side of a spacious brow, was enough to give him a ringing in his
ears, the wild ti