not know that it was an epoch in her own life
when _another_ lot would begin to be no longer secretly but visibly
entwined with her own.

She chose to go through the great Piazza that she might take a first
survey of the unparalleled sight there while she was still alone.
Entering it from the south, she saw something monstrous and
many-coloured in the shape of a pyramid, or, rather, like a huge
fir-tree, sixty feet high, with shelves on the branches, widening and
widening towards the base till they reached a circumference of eighty
yards. The Piazza was full of life: slight young figures, in white
garments, with olive wreaths on their heads, were moving to and fro
about the base of the pyramidal tree, carrying baskets full of
bright-coloured things; and maturer forms, some in the monastic frock,
some in the loose tunics and dark-red caps of artists, were helping and
examining, or else retreating to various points in the distance to
survey the wondrous whole: while a considerable group, amongst whom
Romola recognised Piero di Cosimo, standing on the marble steps of
Orgagna's Loggia, seemed to be keeping aloof in discontent and scorn.

Approaching nearer, she paused to look at the multifarious objects
ranged in gradation from the base to the summit of the pyramid. There
were tapestries and brocades of immodest design, pictures and sculptures
held too likely to incite to vice; there were boards and tables for all
sorts of games, playing-cards along with the blocks for printing them,
dice, and other apparatus for gambling; there were worldly music-books,
and musical instruments in all the pretty varieties of lute, drum,
cymbal, and trumpet; there were masks and masquerading-dresses used in
the old Carnival shows; there were handsome copies of Ovid, Boccaccio,
Petrarca, Pulci, and other books of a vain or impure sort; there were
all the implements of feminine vanity--rouge-pots, false hair, mirrors,
perfumes, powders, and transparent veils intended to provoke inquisitive
glances: lastly, at the very summit, there was the unflattering effigy
of a probably mythical Venetian merchant, who was understood to have
offered a heavy sum for this collection of marketable abominations, and,
soaring above him in surpassing ugliness, the symbolic figure of the old
debauched Carnival.

This was the preparation for a new sort of bonfire--the Burning of
Vanities. Hidden in the interior of the pyramid was a plentiful store
of dry fuel