Don Manuel de Lara: A pox on trovares and clerks, and the French Courts of Love.... I’ll trust to the union of the moon and my own hot blood to find me words!
Sister Assumcion (mockingly): The moon’s a cold dead mare, is your blood a lusty enough stallion to beget ought on her?
Don Manuel de Lara (with an impatient exclamation): I’ve not come to weave fantastic talk like serenading Moors. All I would say can be said in the Old Christians’ Castilian.
Sister Assumcion: Well, sir knight, speak to me then in Castilian.
(Pause.)
Don Manuel de Lara (slowly and deliberately): So you have come to the tryst.
Sister Assumcion: So it would seem.
(Pause.)
Don Manuel de Lara (as if having come to a sudden resolution): Listen, lady. I am no carpet knight, dubbed with a jester’s bladder at a rere-supper of infantas. I won my spurs when I was fourteen at the Battle of Salado. Since then I have been in sieges and skirmishes and night-alarms, enough to dint ten coats of mail. And because there is great merit in fighting the Moors, I have permitted myself to sin lustily. I have even lain with the daughters of Moors and Jews, for which I went on foot to Compostella and did sore penance, for it is a heavy sin, and the one that brought in days gone by the flood upon the earth. But never have I sinned with the wife or daughter or kinswoman of my over-lord, or with one of the brides of Christ. I am from Old Castille, and I cannot forget my immortal soul. But I verily believe that old witch Trotaconventos has laid a spell upon me; for she has so inflamed my blood with her talk of your eyes, your lashes, your small white teeth, your scarlet lips and gums, your breasts, your flanks, your ankles ... oh, I know well the tune to which old bawds trumpet their wares; and man is so fashioned as to be swayed by certain words that act on him like charms—such as “breasts,” “hips,” “lips”—and must as surely burn at the naming of them as a hound must prick his ears and bay at the sound of a distant horn, but it is but with a small, wavering flame, soon quenched, with a “no, no, gutter-crone, none of your scurvy, worm-eaten goods for me!” But when the old witch talked of you, ’twas with the honeyed tongue of Pandar himself, the same that stole from the good Knight, Troilus, all manliness and pride of arms. And she has strangely stirred my dreams ... they are ever of scaling towers and mining walls; but, although dreaming, I know well the towers are not of stone, nor the mines dug in earth ... lady ... I think I am sick ... I——