“Upon my word,” I cried, “you are extremely fortunate, and that is a most attractive description.”

“This woman’s beauty,” he went on, “is a lesson, a morality, a poem!  It’s my daily study.”

Of course, after this, I lost no time in reminding him of what, before we parted, had taken the shape of a promise.  “I feel somehow,” he had said, “as if it were a sort of violation of that privacy in which I have always contemplated her beauty.  This is friendship, my friend.  No hint of her existence has ever fallen from my lips.  But with too great a familiarity we are apt to lose a sense of the real value of things, and you perhaps will throw some new light upon it and offer a fresher interpretation.”

We went accordingly by appointment to a certain ancient house in the heart of Florence—­the precinct of the Mercato Vecchio—­and climbed a dark, steep staircase, to the very summit of the edifice.  Theobald’s beauty seemed as loftily exalted above the line of common vision as his artistic ideal was lifted above the usual practice of men.  He passed without knocking into the dark vestibule of a small apartment, and, flinging open an inner door, ushered me into a small saloon.  The room seemed mean and sombre, though I caught a glimpse of white curtains swaying gently at an open window.  At a table, near a lamp, sat a woman dressed in black, working at a piece of embroidery.  As Theobald entered she looked up calmly, with a smile; but seeing me she made a movement of surprise, and rose with a kind of stately grace.  Theobald stepped forward, took her hand and kissed it, with an indescribable air of immemorial usage.  As he bent his head she looked at me askance, and I thought she blushed.

“Behold the Serafina!” said Theobald, frankly, waving me forward.  “This is a friend, and a lover of the arts,” he added, introducing me.  I received a smile, a curtsey, and a request to be seated.

The most beautiful woman in Italy was a person of a generous Italian type and of a great simplicity of demeanour.  Seated again at her lamp, with her embroidery, she seemed to have nothing whatever to say.  Theobald, bending towards her in a sort of Platonic ecstasy, asked her a dozen paternally tender questions as to her health, her state of mind, her occupations, and the progress of her embroidery, which he examined minutely and summoned me to admire.  It was some portion of an ecclesiastical vestment—­yellow satin wrought with an elaborate design of silver and gold.  She made answer in a full rich voice, but with a brevity which I hesitated whether to attribute to native reserve or to the profane constraint of my presence.  She had been that morning to confession; she had also been to market, and had bought a chicken for dinner.  She felt very happy; she had nothing to complain of except that the people for whom she was making her vestment, and who furnished her materials, should be willing to put such rotten silver thread