Accordingly Julius took the things in his hands, and the two went out of the garden by the door in the wall and left it open. They walked down the short open path to the old summer-house, and Julius made Leonora very comfortable with the shawls for cushions upon the old, wooden bench, which many generations of people had hacked with their knives and adorned with the insignificance of their unknown names.
Side by side they sat in the glory of the summer's afternoon, and the birds perched on the grey old ribs of the summer-house and hopped upon the untrimmed creepers that grew thickly about it, making their small comments to each other about the two people who sat below them, and great green and pink grasshoppers skipped into the open space and out again, a perpetual astonishment in their round, red eyes; all nature was warm and peaceful and happy. The lovers talked together a little, enjoying the sense that speech was not always necessary nor even desirable.
"How do you like the 'Principe'?" Julius asked at last, glancing at the book that lay open on Leonora's knee. He had given it to her to read, because she said she knew so little of Italian thought.
"I hardly know," she said. "It is very wonderful, of course. But I cannot quite believe that Machiavelli believed in it himself, nor that any one ever acted on the advice he gives. It is too complicated and unhuman."
"It always seems to me," said Julius, taking up the question, "that he wrote like a man who inferred a great deal from his own experience—a great deal more than it is safe to infer. He knew men and women very well. He might have been a despotic lover."
"Why?" asked Leonora.
"Do you notice that he always reckons, everywhere and without exception, on the heart of the people and on their personal affection for their sovereign? But he never takes into consideration the possible affection of the sovereign for his subjects."
"That is true," said Leonora. "He was a very heartless individual."
"Perhaps—though I hardly think it," answered Julius. "But he might have written a guide for despotic lovers much better than a book of instruction for tyrannical princes."
"What an idea!" said Leonora, laughing. "But I think he was heartless all the same. He only believed in the people's hearts as a means for getting power."