"You are still the same, I am glad to see. Conversation with the
young savage from Syria hasn't altered you in the least."
"In the first place," said I, "savages do not grow in Syria; and
in the second, how could she have altered me?"
"If the heavens were to open and the New Jerusalem to appear this
moment before you," retorted Judith, with the relevant
irrelevance of her sex, "you would begin an unconcerned
disquisition on the iconography of angels."
I sat on the sofa end and touched one of her little pink ears.
She has pretty ears. They were the first of things physical
about her that attracted me to her years ago in the Roman
pension--they and the mass of silken flax that is her hair, and
her violet eyes.
"Did you learn that particular way of talking in Paris?" I asked.
She had the effrontery to say she was imitating me and that it
was a very good imitation indeed.
We talked about the book. I touched upon the great problem that
requires solution--the harmonising and justifying of the
contradictory opposites in Renaissance character: Fra Lippo Lippi
breaking his own vows and breaking a nun's for her; Perugino
leading his money-grubbing, morose life and painting ethereal
saints and madonnas in his _bottega_, while the Baglioni filled
the streets outside with slaughter; Lorenzo de' Medici bleeding
literally and figuratively his fellow-citizens, going from that
occupation to his Platonic Academy and disputing on the
immortality of the soul, winding up with orgies of sensual
depravity with his boon companion Pulci, and all the time making
himself an historic name for statecraft; Pope Sixtus IV, at the
very heart of the Pazzi conspiracy to murder the Medici--
"And Pope Nicholas V when drunk ordering a man to be executed,
and being sorry for it when sober," said Judith.
Pages:
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152