wide-slashed, and of
a dead-green color with pale purple in the slashes. The hose is
gray.--Those of the blue page, of course, are pure white.--Both wear
barrets.

Such is their appearance.

And now the yellow one is standing up on the balcony, leaning over the
edge, the while the blue is sitting on the bench down by the fountain,
comfortably leaning back, with his ring-covered hands clasped around one
knee. He stares dreamily out upon the Campagna.

Now he speaks:

"No, nothing exists in the world but women!--I don't understand it...
there must be a magic in the lines out of which they are created, merely
when I see them pass: Isaura, Rosamond, and Donna Lisa, and the others.
When I see how their garment clings around their figure and how it
drapes as they walk, it is as if my heart drank the blood out of all
my arteries, and left my head empty and without thoughts and my limbs
trembling and without strength. It is as though my whole being were
gathered into a single, tremulous, uneasy breath of desire. What is it?
Why is it? It is as if happiness went invisibly past my door, and I
had to snatch it and hold it close, and make it my own. It is so
wonderful--and yet I cannot seize it, for I cannot see it."

Then the other page speaks from his balcony:

"And if now you sat at her feet, Lorenzo, and lost in her thoughts she
had forgotten why she had called you, and you sat silent and waiting,
and her lovely face were bent over you further from you in the clouds of
its dreams than the star in the heavens, and yet so near you that every
expression was surrendered to your admiration, every beauty-engendered
line, every tint of the skin in its white stillness as well as in its
soft rosy glow--would it not then be as if she who is sitting there
belonged to another world than the one in which you kneel in adoration!
Would it not be as if hers were another world, as if another world
surrounded her, in which her festively garbed thoughts are going out to
meet some goal which is unknown to you? Her love is far away from all
that is yours, from your world, from everything. She dreams of far
distances and her desires are of far distances. And it seems as if not
the slightest space could be found for you in her thoughts, however
ardently you might desire to sacrifice yourself for her, your life, your
all, to the end that that might be between her and you which is hardly a
faint glimmer of companionship, much less a belonging t