be
sulky; defiant, suspicious, at least.

The place chosen for the new Collegio d'Amore was the Villa Venusta,
whose shady garden can still be seen from the Riviera Businello. This
garden is full of trees, myrtle, wisteria, lilac, acacia--flowering
trees--with a complement of firs and shining laurel to give a setting to
so much golden-green and white. It has a canal on two sides, is a deep,
leafy place, where nightingales sing day and night; it abounds in grass
lawns, flowers, weeping trees, and marble _hermae_. The villa itself is
very stately, a three-storied house in the Venetian style, from whose
upper windows you can command a fine stretch of country; below you on
either hand the Piazza del Santo, the Prato della Valle, with their
enormous churches, pink and grey; beyond these the city walls, the green
plain; lastly, the ragged outline of the far distant hills. It has a
courtyard with lemon trees, long, dim rooms empty of all but coolness,
shuttered against the glare of noon; above, a great saloon coffered in
the ceiling, frescoed on the walls, with a dais and a throne; an open
loggia full of flowers; above all this again, raftered bedrooms smelling
of lavender. A roomy, stately place for those whose lives move easily in
such surroundings; for Ippolita, the girl of the people, happy in her
dark tenement in the Vicolo, gossip of the upper windows, shy beckoner
to the street, burnisher of doorposts at sundown--for Ippolita this
windy great house was a prison, neither more nor less.

It was a prison, at least, conducted according to the best rules of
gallantry then obtaining. They bowed her up the staircase to the
refectory: they sat her down and plied her on their knees with fruit and
cups of wine. They led her to the throne room, where, high above them
all, she was to sit, and (being crowned) hear them contend in verse and
prose for the privilege of her love for the day. It was all arranged.
She was to have a favourite every day, man or maid. Favour was to go by
merit among her slaves. The theme was always to be her incomparable
virtues--her beauty, discretion, wit (poor dumb fish!), her shining
chastity, power of binding and loosing by one soft blue ray from her
eyes, etc. They displayed her emblems on the walls--the peacock, because
her beauty was her pride, her pride her beauty; doves, because they were
Aphrodite's birds; rabbits, because the artist understood rabbits; the
beaver, that glorious witness of virtue