I said something of the sort to Judith, after she had resumed her seat and I had opened the window, the minstrel having wandered to the next hostelry, where the process of converting “Love’s Sweet Dream” into a nightmare was still faintly audible. Judith looked at me whimsically, as I stood breathing the comparatively fresh air and enjoying the relative silence. “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.