ubtle seclusion, of a cloistered lusciousness, of dim, green,
guarded gardens, where the sighs of love's novices are stifled by the
drip of stealthy fountains and the babble of fantastic birds. I suppose
it was no more than my fancy, or a trick of my memory confusing later
things with earlier, that makes me now, as I write, seem to recall what
seemed like a smile on the face of the pagan effigy of Love as Madonna
Vittoria swam into her company, as if the Greekish image recognized in
the woman a creature of the early days when cunning fingers fashioned
him. For, indeed, Vittoria was not modern in the sense that we
Florentines are modern. She derived from a world long dead and buried.
Heavens, how Messer Alcibiades would have admired her!

"Good-morrow, gentle gentles," she began, in that caressing voice, "why
are you absent from the sacrifice?"

Guido looked for the instant perplexed by the woman's words, and he
moved a little nearer to her. As for Dante, he seemed to have forgotten
us all, even to have forgotten his book, and though he had risen when
Monna Vittoria approached, he had by this time sunk onto the stone seat
again, and seemed drowned in a brown study.

"What sacrifice, lady?" Guido asked of Vittoria; and whenever Guido
spoke to a woman, he spoke as if all the pleasures and destinies of the
world depended upon that one woman's interest and caprice.

Madonna Vittoria smiled, self-satisfied, as all women smiled when Guido
so addressed them. "Why, the sacrifice of the pearl to the pig," she
answered; and she still smiled as she spoke, but there was a kind of
anger in her eyes. "The sacrifice of a clean child to a coarse churl,
the sacrifice of Folco Portinari's little Beatrice to my big Simone,
that I do not choose to lose."

Here I broke in, laughing, for I took the drift of her meaning, and was
wishful to prove myself alert. "Most allegorical lady," I protested, "I
take you very clearly when you explain your own fable." And I rubbed my
hands, instantly pleased with myself and my nimbleness.

But Messer Guido still looked thoughtful. "If the ladies of Florence,"
he said, slowly, "make Madonna Beatrice their May-queen, that dainty
deed does not deliver her to Simone of the Bardi."

Madonna Vittoria turned upon him with a sharpness seldom seen on a
woman's face when it bent toward Messer Guido of the Cavalcanti. Her
smooth forehead wrinkled with an unfamiliar frown; her full lips seemed
to tighten and nar