cause they wanted
their suppers, and would presently want their breakfasts. We sat among
the band and the babies for some time to get accustomed to the noise, and
then passed into the room where the dancing was going on. All round sat
the friends and relations, some with babies, some without; and all the
ladies very serious, the bride in the middle chair of a row along one
wall was so desperately serious that she was quite forbidding.

As when the traveller asks the chambermaid if he can have his linen back
from the wash in time to catch an early train, and notices an expression
passing across her face as she replies, "Impossibilissimo!"--well knowing
that nothing is easier, only she wants an extra fifty centimes--even such
an expression did I see not passing across the face of the bride, but
frozen upon it as she sat with her back up against the wall frowning on
the company. Peppino said she was all right. Brides have to behave like
this; they consider it modest and maiden-like to appear to take no
interest or pleasure in their wedding ceremonies.

The bridegroom was a very different sort of person--gay, alert and all
the time dancing, talking, laughing and gesticulating with every one, as
though his good spirits and vitality were inexhaustible.

The guests on the chairs left space for only two couples at a time. At
the first opportunity Peppino began to dance, choosing for his partner a
young lady who was not merely the prettiest girl in the room, but the
most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She was also an exception to the
other ladies in that she looked happy, especially when dancing with
Peppino. She had a quantity of fine, black, curly hair, a dark
complexion and surprising eyes, like Love-in-a-mist when the morning sun
shines on it, full of laughter and good humour. Her eyelids, her nose
and chin, her full lips and the curves of her cheeks were modelled with
the delicate precision of a violin, and when she moved it was with that
wave-o'-the-sea motion which Florizel observed in Perdita's dancing. I
put her black hair and complexion down to some Arabian ancestor, and her
blue eyes to some Norman strain.

"Who is that wonderfully beautiful girl you have been dancing with,
Peppino?" said I.

He replied, with a rather bored air, that her name was Brancaccia, and
that she was the daughter of a distant cousin of his father who kept a
curiosity shop in the corso.

"How long has this been going on, Peppin