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Gian Bellini carried her to Venice, to lead Scythians in trousers against Theseus in plate-armour and a blazoned shield. Giorgione set her burning in the shade, trying to cool her golden flank in deep mosses by a well. All this, and much more, Ippolita endured because she was a good as well as a beautiful girl.
The pale apparition of a fair-haired boy, timid in rags, cloaked in rusty black, with bandaged legs, and his old felt hat crushed against his breast, stood in the doorway. "Oh, boy!" cried Alessandro, gesticulating with one hand, "may you be my Hermes, my swiftfoot messenger. Tell me what you know of the divine Ippolita." "I know where she is, Signor Sotto-Prefetto," says Silvestro huskily.
But by the time that I had come to this point the pretty Ippolita, whose name I had intended to place there, was no longer the moment's idol of my soul, and between the two dainty girls that had succeeded her I sat for a long while embarrassed, like the schoolman's ass between the two bundles of hay, not knowing, as it were, at which to bite.
"Hey, comrade," said he, grinning, "one sees that the Jew's stair was easier going for thee than Ortone." And he prodded her with his staff. This was not friendly. Ippolita did her best to humour him. "I go up as well as I can, Castracane," she said. "But do you go first, if you will." "Nay, nay," he replied, with a chuckle; "I make very good practice in the rear."
"Send for a priest, Ippolita, that is the only chance. But, remember, when they have washed you, they put clothes upon you like these. Ah, but it is worth a girl's while to have silk upon her, and these chains, and these pearls. Corpaccio! there is no Madonna in Padua with such stones as these, nor any bishop either, upon my faith!" Ippolita shook her beautiful head.
The city gates were open, it is true; in some churches the doors stood wide for the first mass; they passed a priest or so just up, a friar or so, furtive truants from their beds; then, at the edge of the Piazza del Santo, Ippolita peeping through her curtains saw a little company of goatherds, blanketted, brown-legged, shabby rogues, their feet white with country dust, new in from the hills with their flocks.
"And thou, Roussel ... Ippolita, Ippolita!" he called to his wife. "It is Roussel." Audrey did not turn her head. She could not. But presently Roussel, in a blue suit with a wonderful flowing bow of a black necktie in crêpe de Chine, was led before her. And Musa was led before Roussel. Audrey, from nervousness, was moved to relate the history of Musa's accident to Roussel. The moment had arrived.
The classics, the ingenuous arts, lovely woman always interwoven when times are happiest flourished in that sunny place: it was not really wonderful that Ippolita the stone-cutter's daughter, classically fair, indisputably a beauty, should win all seeing eyes and be the despair of all rhymers. The Paduan girls are all charming, and mostly pretty.
The shoulders of the ladies at play were no barer than those of the slatterns who gaped at them playing; but for Ippolita, who had always been a decent girl, let us hope her blushes were a cloak. She felt naked. And the bath, remember, had unnerved her. What these neighbours of hers may have thought is no concern of ours, since the actors in the play took no concern in it.
Ippolita, whimpering in hers, wondered what the buzzing and sliding of shoes in the street below could be about. She had troubles of her own, poor girl, but she could not stand this. Up she got: a single glance out of window was enough. She shuffled on a shift and a petticoat, snatched a shawl, and tiptoed out. Annina, her bosom friend, had no troubles.
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