as truculently as ever, and I hoped he would be willing to let
bygones be bygones.

"Does he still bear such a grudge for a single rose-blossom?" I asked.
And it seemed to me that it was scarcely in reason to be so pettily
revengeful toward a youth that had carried himself so valiantly and so
cunningly in the countenance of a great danger.

Monna Vittoria answered me very swiftly and decidedly. "Messer Simone
has a little mind in his big body, and little minds cling to trifles.
But it is not the matter of the rose alone that chokes him, but chiefly
the matter of the poems."

I stared at Monna Vittoria with round eyes of wonder. "What poems?" I
asked; for, indeed, I did not understand her drift.

She frowned a little in impatience at my slowness. "Why, surely," she
said, "those poems that Messer Dante has written in praise of Beatrice
of the Portinari, and in declaration of his service to her. Have you not
seen them? Have you not heard of them? Do you not, who are his friend,
know that they were written by young Dante?"

Now, indeed, I knew nothing of the kind, and I could not, in reviewing
the matter, blame myself very greatly for my lack of knowledge. Who
could guess that a scholarly youth who was now very suddenly and wholly,
as I had heard, addicted to martial exercises, should, in a twinkling
and without the least warning, prove the peer of the practised poets of
Florence? Nor was there in the poems that I had seen any plain hint
given that the lady they praised was Madonna Beatrice.

"Are you very sure?" I asked. And yet even as I asked I felt that it
must be so, and that I ought, by rights, to have known it before, for
all that it was so very surprising. For when a man is in love and has
anything of the poet in him, that poet is like to leap into life fully
armed with equipment of songs and sonnets, as Minerva, on a memorable
occasion, made her all-armored ascent from the riven brows of Jove.

The lady was very scornful of my thick-headedness, and was at no pains
to conceal her scorn, for all that I had written her so honorable a copy
of verses.

"Am I sure? How could I be other than sure? Why, on that day when
Madonna Beatrice flung your Dante the rose from her nosegay, I knew by
the look in the lad's face that he no less than worshipped her. Was I
not standing in the press? Did I not see all, even to the humiliation of
Simone? It needed no very keen vision to divine the beginning of many
things, love a