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"Find out what she is going to do to-day," she whispered. Carolina nodded and her shrivelled monkey face was puckered into a smile. She came back presently. "She is going to the Duomo and then to colazione with the De Sancti. She will go with Signora Aurelia to see the Palio and only come back here to supper." Gemma went back to her room to finish her dressing.
Could this be the city where I was once nearly roasted to death? It is an effort to recall that glistening month of the Palio festival, a month I spent at a genuine pension for a set purpose, namely, to write a study on the habits of "The Pension-cats of Europe" those legions of elderly English spinsters who lead crepuscular lives in continental boarding-houses.
The city was full of visitors, for a Palio was to be run in the Campo, the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence was to celebrate pontifically in the cathedral, and our company of actors not because it was the best, but as being the only one available was commanded to perform in the theatre before the Podesta, the Gonfalonier and Senate, and all the representatives of Government, of the university, and of the garrison.
The brown wrinkled old men and women, the lithe, slender youths in their suits of black broadcloth wood gods disguised by cheap tailoring all had left their work and come many a mile along the dusty roads and across fields to the town for the dear Madonna's sake, and to see the Palio.
The Palio, indubitably, was <i>criard</i> and the more so for quite monopolising, at Siena, the note of crudity; and much of it demanded doubtless of one's patience a due respect for the long local continuity of such things; it drops into its humoured position, however, in any retrospective command of the many brave aspects of the prodigious place.
'I shall be your courier, dear lady, he said, and commenced his professional career in her service by shouting to the vetturino to drive on. Wilfrid met them as he was trotting down from the Porta del Palio, and to him his sister confided her new trouble in having a strange man attached to her, who might be anything.
Do not look so. Oh, I will not go to the Palio. I will stay with you." "No, you must go, and to-morrow you can tell me all about it. But will you kiss me now? Do." "You need not ask twice, dear Astorre," she whispered, as she leant over him and touched his forehead with her lips. "Ma che!" he said ungratefully. "That's nothing. Kiss me properly and at once."
Maestro Tacco will no more come here again to sit for patients than he will take to licking marble for his dinner." "You are going towards the Piazza della Signoria, Messer Domenico," said Macchiavelli. "I will go with you, and we shall perhaps see who has deserved the palio among these racers. Come, Melema, will you go too?"
"You are right; he is always pale in the summer," she said, trying to persuade herself that it was so. "You will come to-morrow to tell him about the Palio?" "Yes, surely." There were to be fireworks later on at the Fortezza and illuminations of the Lizza gardens, so the human tide set that way and left the outlying parts of the city altogether.
'I shall be your courier, dear lady, he said, and commenced his professional career in her service by shouting to the vetturino to drive on. Wilfrid met them as he was trotting down from the Porta del Palio, and to him his sister confided her new trouble in having a strange man attached to her, who might be anything.
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