self from his abstraction, and was listening to
the dialogue, felt a new rush of the vague half-formed ideas about
Tessa, which had passed through his mind the evening before: if Monna
Ghita were really taken out of the way, it would be easier for him to
see Tessa again--whenever he wanted to see her.

"_Gnaffe_, Maestro," Nello went on, in a sympathising tone, "you are the
slave of rude mortals, who, but for you, would die like brutes, without
help of pill or powder. It is pitiful to see your learned lymph oozing
from your pores as if it were mere vulgar moisture. You think my
shaving will cool and disencumber you? One moment and I have done with
Messer Francesco here. It seems to me a thousand years till I wait upon
a man who carries all the science of Arabia in his head and saddle-bags.
Ecco!"

Nello held up the shaving-cloth with an air of invitation, and Maestro
Tacco advanced and seated himself under a preoccupation with his heat
and his self-importance, which made him quite deaf to the irony conveyed
in Nello's officiously polite speech.

"It is but fitting that a great medicus like you," said Nello, adjusting
the cloth, "should be shaved by the same razor that has shaved the
illustrious Antonio Benevieni, the greatest master of the chirurgic
art."

"The chirurgic art!" interrupted the doctor, with an air of contemptuous
disgust. "Is it your Florentine fashion to put the masters of the
science of medicine on a level with men who do carpentry on broken
limbs, and sew up wounds like tailors, and carve away excrescences as a
butcher trims meat? _Via_! A manual art, such as any artificer might
learn, and which has been practised by simple barbers like yourself--on
a level with the noble science of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna,
which penetrates into the occult influences of the stars and plants and
gems!--a science locked up from the vulgar!"

"No, in truth, Maestro," said Nello, using his lather very deliberately,
as if he wanted to prolong the operation to the utmost, "I never thought
of placing them on a level: I know your science comes next to the
miracles of Holy Church for mystery. But there, you see, is the pity of
it,"--here Nello fell into a tone of regretful sympathy--"your high
science is sealed from the profane and the vulgar, and so you become an
object of envy and slander. I grieve to say it, but there are low
fellows in this city--mere _sgherri_, who go about in nightcaps and long
bea