ou could see and hear chatter the couple of adventurers if you cared.
Bellaroba you have seen already--very gentle, very simple, very unformed
without and within. She had pretty ways, coaxing and appealing ways.
When she asked a question it was with lifted eyebrows and a head on one
side. She would take your hand without art, and let you hold it without
afterthought. It was the easiest thing in the world to kiss her, for she
suffered it gladly and quite innocently; it came as naturally as to a
cat to rub his cheek on your chair or swinging foot. Yet the girl was as
modest as a Clare. If you had presumed on your licence to make love to
her, it would not have been her scorn (for she had none), but her
distress that would have set you back in your place. God knows what La
Fragiletta might have taught her. It is certain she was all unlettered
in love up to that hour. Bellaroba was not only modest by instinct, but
that better thing, innocent by preoccupation.

In all this she was a dead contrast to her handsome friend Olimpia
Castaneve, who was really a beauty of the true Venetian mould. As sleek
and sumptuous as a cat, as splendidly coloured as a sunburnt nectarine,
crowned with a mass of red-gold hair, as stupid as she was sly, and as
rich as she was spendthrift, the lovely Olimpia had been sent
adventuring to the bees of Ferrara, not as lacking honey for Venice, but
as being too great a treasure for her mother's house. Her mother was La
Farfalla--a swollen butterfly in these days--and frankly said that she
could not afford such a daughter. Olimpia had no instructions; in fact,
needed none. She went cheerfully out to what Monna Nanna and the Blessed
Virgin should prepare for her, without kisses (which she garnered
against the lean years) and without reserves. She neither condemned her
mother nor approved. Perhaps she had not the wit; assuredly she lacked
the energy. She was remarkably handsome in her hot Venetian way, richly
coloured, brown-eyed, crimson-lipped, bosomed like a goddess and shaped
like a Caryatid. She half closed her eyes, half opened her lips, smiled
and drowsed and waited. You would have thought her melting with love;
she was ciphering a price, but being slow at figures, she hid herself
(spiderwise) in a golden mesh. Olimpia was nearly always complaisant,
had no reticences, no conscience, few brains. She was luxury itself,
fond of the fire, fond of her bed, fond of her dinner. Admittedly
self-absorbed, she