Towards dusk Alfieri put by his books, and descended through the twilit streets of the upper city--where the troops of red and yellow and blue seminarists, and black and brown monks, passed by like ants, homeward bound after their evening walk--into the busier parts of Rome, and crossing the Corso filled with painted and gilded coaches, and making his way through the many squares where the people gathered round the lemonade-booth near the fountain or the obelisk, through the tortuous black streets filled with the noise of the anvils and hammers of the locksmiths and nailors behind the Pantheon, made his way towards the palace, grand and prim in its architecture of Bramants, of the Cancelleria, perhaps not without thinking that in the big square before its windows, where the vegetable carts were unloaded every morning, and the quacks and dentists and pedlars bawled all day, a man as strange, as wayward and impatient of tyranny as himself, Giordano Bruno, had been burned two centuries before by Cardinal York's predecessor in that big palace of the Cancelleria. Fortunately there was no Cardinal York in the Cancelleria, or at least only rarely; but instead only the beautiful blonde woman with the dark hazel eyes, whom Alfieri spoke of as his "lady," and, somewhat later, "as the sweet half of himself," and in whose speech Alfieri was never Alfieri, or Vittorio, or the Count, but merely "the poet," so completely had these strange, self-modelling, unconsciously-attitudinising lovers, arrayed themselves and their love according to the pattern of Dante and Petrarch. To the Countess, we may be sure, Alfieri never failed to give a most elaborate account of his day's work, nor to read to her whatever scenes of his plays he had blocked out, in prose, or worked up in verse. By 11 o'clock, he tells us, he was always back in his solitary little villa on the Esquiline.