“How?”
“You’re mediaeval. The fire has melted the ice.”
She took my hand gratefully and drew me nearer. “Do you like me better?”
“Much better. I keep thinking how like you are to Simonetta in The Kingdom of Venus. I spent hours sitting before it at the Accademia in Florence. I couldn’t tell what was the attraction. Now I know. It was you I was looking at; you as you are now—not as you were.”
“Dante,” she said, “you can see what is beautiful in a painting or a poem, but you can’t see beauty in things themselves. You’re afraid to—you’re afraid of being disillusioned. You see life as reflected in a mirror.”
“It’s safer,” I smiled.
She took me up sharply. There was pain in what she said. “Ah, yes, safer! You’re always counting the cost and looking ahead for sorrow. You’re a pagan, but fear makes you an ascetic. You have the feeling that joy is something stolen, and you grow timid lest you’re going to be bad.”
“That’s true.”
“Can’t you believe,” she whispered, “that anything that makes two people happy must be right and best?”
“I wish I could.”