“Devout? You, Gualtiero? Oh, Santo Spirito, what a noble figure you would make arrayed as a black Dominican! You would even pass for a Master Inquisitor.” “In which case I think I know a noble lady one could send to the rack for a thousand pagan heresies. Well--Rocca has just hinted your father will be Pope: may he have a long pontificate ere I succeed him. But less merrily, I sometimes wonder whither all this pleasant, gay life at His Holiness’s court is tending.” “To a great fête on Corpus Christi day, I trust sincerely.” “And something thereafter. Hear this, Madonna,--Italy is not quite all the world, though you may think it. What if we, with our Greek and Latin, our Plato and our Plotinus, have learned to laugh at much of the old theology, to think that San Marco and Æsop alike wrote very good fables? Believe me, beyond the Alps they still receive the old story of God and the saints as open-eyed peasants stand before a mountebank. And if some day your ‘doltish Germans’ (as you say) learn how His Holiness and the rest use these fables to filch money from their purses,--do you think the round bags of gulden will come to Rome quite so steadily as before?” Marianna shrugged her shoulders gracefully. “I don’t like your talk, Gualtiero. I only know that almost everybody who has advised keeping back the Pope’s dues has been burned, and that the last indulgence sale in Germany was profitable.” “Excellent,” I assented; “still, suppose I do not prosper in the Church? My plans go wrong?” “The dispensation to reënter the world is purchasable. You would still have your countships. We might even marry.” “Marriage is the death of true love, carissima,” said I, my face close now to hers. And what more we might have done I know not, for at this instant our friends the Bishop of Montebello and the guards-captain Della Fabriano surprised us, evidently upon some errand.... An excursion up the Tiber towards Primaporta was what they wanted us to join, and you may wager we did not decline on such a day. His Reverence of Montebello was accompanied by a charming Florentine lady whom he called his cousin: Fabriano was with a handsome, but somewhat dull lady of Ravenna whom he did not call his cousin. Both of the gentlemen had a lively wit, and there was enough bright dialogue amongst us to go into a stage-play. Whilst our six stout watermen stroked us along the yellow twisting stream we made Latin verses in praise of Fabriano’s exploits upon the recent Urbino expedition: verses which Montebello swore were equal to Ovid’s; and we attempted a few in Greek, although here none of the ladies could follow us save Marianna.