e thereof."

Whilst such discourse was toward between the ladies, behold, there
entered the church three young men,--yet not so young that the age of
the youngest of them was less than five-and-twenty years,--in whom
neither the perversity of the time nor loss of friends and kinsfolk,
no, nor fear for themselves had availed to cool, much less to quench,
the fire of love. Of these one was called Pamfilo,[19] another
Filostrato[20] and the third Dioneo,[21] all very agreeable and
well-bred, and they went seeking, for their supreme solace, in such a
perturbation of things, to see their mistresses, who, as it chanced,
were all three among the seven aforesaid; whilst certain of the other
ladies were near kinswomen of one or other of the young men.

[Footnote 19: See ante, p. 8, note.]

[Footnote 20: _Filostrato_, Greek [Greek: philos], loving, and [Greek:
stratos], army, _met._ strife, war, _i.e._ one who loves strife. This
name appears to be a reminiscence of Boccaccio's poem (_Il
Filostrato_, well known through its translation by Chaucer and the
Senechal d'Anjou) upon the subject of the loves of Troilus and
Cressida and to be in this instance used by him as a synonym for an
unhappy lover, whom no rebuffs, no treachery can divert from his
ill-starred passion. Such a lover may well be said to be in love with
strife, and that the Filostrato of the Decameron sufficiently answers
to this description we learn later on from his own lips.]

[Footnote 21: _Dioneo_, a name probably coined from the Greek [Greek:
Dione], one of the _agnomina_ of Venus (properly her mother's name)
and intended to denote the amorous temperament of his personage, to
which, indeed, the erotic character of most of the stories told by him
bears sufficient witness.]

No sooner had their eyes fallen on the ladies than they were
themselves espied of them; whereupon quoth Pampinea, smiling, "See,
fortune is favourable to our beginnings and hath thrown in our way
young men of worth and discretion, who will gladly be to us both
guides and servitors, an we disdain not to accept of them in that
capacity." But Neifile, whose face was grown all vermeil for
shamefastness, for that it was she who was beloved of one of the young
men, said, "For God's sake, Pampinea, look what thou sayest! I
acknowledge most frankly that there can be nought but all good said of
which one soever of them and I hold them sufficient unto a much
greater thing than this, even as I opine