"What do you think of D'Annunzio?" asked Nino of Nancy, when the poets had stopped a moment to take breath.
"I have not read him. I have read nobody and nothing," said Nancy.
"That is right," cried Marvasi, the unwashed, nodding his rusty head and clapping his dusty fingers. "Read nothing, and retain your originality."
"Read everything," cried Cesare Raffaelli, "and cultivate form."
During the discussion that followed, the din of the two poets' voices built a wall of solitude round Nino and Nancy.
"How old are you?" asked Nino, looking at her mild forehead, where the dark eyebrows lay over her light grey eyes like quiet wings.
"Sixteen," said Nancy; and the dimple dipped.
Nino did not return her smile. "Sixteen!" he said. And because his eyes were used to the line of a fading cheek and the bitterness of a tired mouth, his heart fell, love-struck and conquered, before Nancy's cool and innocent youth. It was inevitable.
"Sixteen!" he repeated, looking at her, grave and wondering. "Is anybody in the world sixteen?"
And it was not the inspired author of the poems over which half Italy raved, but the little girl with the wing-like eyebrows, that his wonder went to; and it was the chilly little hand of the maiden, not the pulse of the poet, that shook his heart loose from those other white, well-remembered hands, where the blue veins, soft and slightly turgid, marked the slower course of the blood—those sad blue veins which moved his pity and strangled his desire.