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Ippolita, a miracle of rose and gold, in a white gauzy robe, her hair crowned with daisies, was Queen of Love and Beauty, fanned by ladies in red. Del Dardo tilted with Vittore Marzipane, Gottardo de' Brancacci with Giacomo Fèo, a young lion from the Romagna. Messer Meleagro very nearly fell off his horse.
Meleagro decided that he was not, and was accepted by Ippolita, not because she admired his reasoning but because she thought it part of the game.
"Edge up, Alessandro, edge up accost, accost!" said Meleagro; but "Do you think I would profane the aura of her by my abhorred presence?" cried the lover. "Ah, God of Love, I would die sooner! I feel, indeed, my Dæmon at work. Let me sit upon this bench my tablets, ha!" He sat. Finely disordered verse, rime sciolte, resulted; but Ippolita was so far unperturbed.
Meleagro beat his forehead to see her so lovely and so unapproachable; Orsini bit his lip; but Alessandro, mindful of his nails, and not to be Sub-Prefect for nothing, went away to find the girl's father. This worthy bowed to the earth before his visitor. In what way could His Excellency be served? By the acceptance, on Matteo's part, of twenty ducats? Benissimo, e tante grazie!
That evening in his fellowship, Meleagro and Stazio, cloaked and lurking under the arcades, saw Ippolita walk down the Via Pozzo Depinto arm in arm with two shawled friends, transparently in the ranks of the popol basso, but as obviously not of them. Her golden head was bare; also by a head she sailed above them.
She was not; but she wronged her adorers, who neither thought it nor hoped it of her. Messer Alessandro was not growing his nails for that sort of ware; nor could he have treated the Pope with more respect. He had never ventured to speak, though he had never failed to salute her. What he wrote was chiefly in verse, and as Ippolita could not read, it really did not much matter what his letters contained. Meleagro had opened his mouth to pay her a compliment: he won a frightened look out of her blue eyes, a fine blush, and lived upon them for a week. The ladies were bolder. Some of them had walked with her once in the Prato. There was very little to say, except that they loved her and thought her like a goddess. Ippolita was rather scared, laughed nervously, and said, "Chi lo sa?" Donna Euforbia then told her the story of the original Ippolita, the Scythian queen; of King Theseus, and the child born to them in sea-washed Acharnæ. The Paduan Ippolita said "Gi
She cried herself to sleep at last. Next day it was Meleagro who won her by a careful consideration of the question, "Whether or no, when a gentleman has served a lady for ten years, and she falls sick of the small-pox, he is ipso facto absolved of his vow?"
Away he went, his heart leaping like a wood-fire, to report to Meleagro de' Martiri and Stazio Orsini, to Donna Euforbia, Donna Clarice, and Donna Simpatica friends and poets alike that he had had a most rare vision.
The three poets Stazio Orsini in white and yellow, Alessandro del Dardo in white and green, and Meleagro de' Martiri in a plum-coloured cloak accompanied her down the Via Pozzo Depinto to her poor house in the quarter of Santa Caterina; she lived in the Vicolo Agnus Dei.
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