'It is a festa to-day,' she said, her laughing face appearing over the flowers that covered her whole bosom up to the throat.
'Thanks! Thanks!' Andrea cried again and again as he helped her to empty the mass of bloom on to the table, all over the books and papers and portfolios—'Rosa rosarum!'
Her hands once free, she proceeded to collect all the vases in the room and fill them with roses, arranging each cluster with rare artistic skill. While she did so, she talked of a thousand things with her usual blithe volubility, almost as if compensating herself for the parsimony of words and laughter she had exercised up till now, out of regard for Andrea's taciturn melancholy.
Presently she remarked, 'On the 15th we expect a beautiful guest, Donna Maria Ferrès y Capdevila, the wife of the Plenipotentiary for Guatemala. Do you know her?'
'I think not,'
'No, I do not suppose you could. She only returned to Italy a few months ago, but she will spend next winter in Rome because her husband has been appointed to that post. She is a very dear friend of mine—we knew each other as children, and were three years together at the Convent of the Annunciation in Florence. She is younger than I am.'
'Is she an American?'
'No, an Italian. She is from Sienna. She comes of the Bandinelli family, and was baptized with water from the "Fonte Gaja." For all that, she is rather melancholy by nature, but very sweet. The story of her marriage is not a very cheerful one. Ferrès is a most unsympathetic person. However, they have a little girl—a perfect darling—you will see; a little white face with enormous eyes and masses of dark hair. She is very like her mother—Look, Andrea, is not that rose just like velvet? And this—I could eat it—look—it is like glorified cream. How delicious!'
She went on picking out the different roses and chatting pleasantly. A wave of perfume, intoxicating as century-old wine, streamed from the massed flowers; some of the petals dropped and hung in the folds of Francesca's gown; beneath the window the dark shaft of a cypress pierced the golden sunshine, and through Andrea's memory ran persistently, like a phrase of music, a line from Petrarch:—
'Cosi partia le rose e le parole.'