old are you?’ said the Duchess.
‘Nineteen. It is my birthday.’
‘Strange: and mine. Nineteen: so young, and yet so very—’
‘Your grace will scarcely set down my youth against me as a vice, I hope: youth, and no stomach for fools—’
‘O I concern not myself with your ladyship’s vices. Enough with your virtues: murder, and (shall we say?) poudre agrippine.’
Fiorinda smoothed her white dress. ‘The greater wonder,’ she said, with a delicate air, ‘that your grace should go out of your way to assign me a place at court, then.’
‘You think it a wonder?’ the Duchess said. ‘It is needful, then, that you understand the matter. It is not in me to grudge a friend’s pleasures. Rather do I study to retain a dozen or so women of your leaven about me, both as foils to my own qualities and in case ever, in an idle hour, he should have a mind for such highly seasoned sweetmeats.’
The Lady Fiorinda abode silent, looking down into the water at her feet. The full moon was rising behind a hill on the far side of the valley, and two trees upon the sky-line stood out clear like some little creature’s feet held up against the moon’s face. A bat flittered across the open above the pool, to and again. High in the air a heron went over, swiftly on slow wing-beats, uttering three or four times his wild harsh cry. There was a pallour of moonlight on that lady’s face, thus seen sideways, downward-gazing, and on her arm, bare to the shoulder, and on the white of her gown that took life from every virginal sweet line of her body, standing so, poised in that tranquillity; and the black of her hair made all the awakening darknesses of the summer night seem luminous. And now, with the lifting of her arm to settle the pins in her back hair, there was a flash of black lightning that opened from amid those pallours and in a flash was hidden, leaving upon the air a breathlessness and a shudder like the shudder of the world’s desire. At length, still side-face to the Duchess, still gazing into that quiet water, she spoke: ‘A dozen? Of my leaven? Must they be like me to look upon? or is it enough that they be—? but I will not borrow your grace’s words.’
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