In one of her letters to Sinapi, she reports favourably of Theodora's progress. "Your daughter," she writes, "every day learns something, and is thus, little by little, putting together her riches." Look, reader; see, if by putting your eye to the magic glass, you cannot discern the little party framed there in that autumn of the year 1552, in a rather large, but very low, wainscoted room of one of those narrow high–peaked houses, with quaint gables, seeming to be almost endowed with physiognomical expression, that wink and nod at each other across the narrow German street. Doctissimus dominus Andreas is abroad among his patients, of whom he has only too many, much disease being generated, as usual, by the cramming of a number of ill–paid, ill–fed, ill–lodged, and ill–lived soldiers into the narrow quarters of a close–walled town. Olympia and her two pupils are sitting near the small first–floor window which projects over the street, that they may have all the little pale light there is, as the three heads bend together over the small, but well–cut, type of that octavo volume of the Iliad which Luke Anthony Giunta printed at Venice in the year 1537, and which poor Peregrino Morato, being an exile in that city at the time, bought with so much difficulty. The precious volume is not endangered by any easy–chair fashion of holding it in the hand, or letting it lie on the lap, but reposes stately on a little wooden desk in front of Olympia's chair, while Theodora and Emilio stand one on each side the youthful matron's knee. The large low chamber, extending over the narrow entrance passage, and two small rooms, one on each side on the ground–floor, occupies the entire extent of the house on the first floor, and has two narrow windows. [Sidenote: THE FAMILY GROUP.] At the other of these sits, occupied in some household task, our maid Barbara,—she alone of all the other maids–of–all–work, mending hose, washing windows, or stewing saur–kraut, that day in wide Germany, still extant,—a good servant enough, if "ipsius mores" could be tolerated.[109] For Barbara's immortality, sad to say, rests mainly like that of some other historical personages, on this questionability of her moral character. Yes! there, clearly enough, sits Barbara at the other window, doing what was to be done under the eye of her mistress, who does not approve of her hand–maiden running out into streets filled with Spanish soldiers, and who finds, as she says at the end of the dialogue she sent to Lavinia della Rovere, that all goes wrong in a house as soon as the mistress's back is turned.