, who makes himself less
certainly a beaver that he may be more safely a saint; the beaver, I
say, in white on a green field. Other symbols--the lily of her candour,
the rose of her glowing cheeks, the crocus of her hair, the pink
anemones which were her toes, the almond for her fingers: she saw
herself articulated; her fauna, her flora, her moral and physical
attributes cried at her from the four walls.

Ippolita sat very scared on her throne, and endured what she could by
catching firmly to the knobs of it and blinking her eyes. One by one
they came creeping, these silken ladies, these slashed and curled young
lords, to kiss her hand. "Dio mio!" thought she. "What is all this
about? And are maids courted this way among the great?" She knew very
little about it, yet was quite sure they were not. She wondered when
Alessandro's business was going to begin. As a matter of fact, it _had_
begun. He was now removing several inches of superfluous finger-nail
with a sword.

For the first day that same Alessandro del Dardo won her to himself by
his descant upon the theme, "How a gentleman may dismember himself
without dishonour for a lady's love; and how not."

"Now he has me," thought poor Ippolita, and set her teeth. But he lay at
her feet most of the day, and though at night he led her into the
garden, if you will believe me, he never even kissed her hand.

"Who is mad?" thought she to herself, staring from her bed into the
shadowy angles of the room. "Am I mad? Are these signori all mad? Is
this a mad-house? Dio! it soon should be at this rate." She cried
herself to sleep at last.

Next day it was Meleagro who won her by a careful consideration of the
question, "Whether or no, when a gentleman has served a lady for ten
years, and she falls sick of the small-pox, he is _ipso facto_ absolved
of his vow?" Meleagro decided that he was not, and was accepted by
Ippolita, not because she admired his reasoning but because she thought
it part of the game.

Next came the turn of Donna Emilia, a very burning poetess, for a
Sapphic ode; and so on and so on. After three days Ippolita found
herself yawning her head off; the longing for freedom returned, for the
open country, the hills, the goatherds. Not for her home in the Vicolo:
this everlasting love-making with its aftertaste of stale sugar had
turned her sick of Padua. The whole city, to her mind, reeked of
bergamot; she guessed a fawning lover at every street corner, a pryer