This answer seemed to completely disappoint all of her hopes for the new acquaintance. Lost in thought, she played with a golden necklace, she wore around her neck.
"And who are you, beautiful neighbour?" asked Andrea in a tender tone, which completely contradicted the motionless expression of his face. "To have your charming sight so close to me, will comfort me in my sufferings."
She apparently felt satisfied, since he now turned to that tone which she had a right to expect.
"To you," she said, "I'm Princess Smeraldina, who is granting you the permission to long for her favour from afar. Whenever you'll see me putting on this turban, this shall be a sign for you that I'm inclined to chat with you. For I'm more bored than I could bear, considering my youth and my charms. You must know," she continued, suddenly dropping out of character, "that my mistress, the countess, won't permit me at all to have even the slightest love affair, though she herself changes her lovers more frequently than her shirts. She says that she had always thrown her confidante and chamber-maid out of her services as soon as she would have attempted to serve two masters, her and the little winged god. I now have to suffer under her prejudice, and if I wouldn't find some other satisfaction here, and if there wasn't, from time to time, a kind stranger living over there in your room, who'd fall just a little bit in love with me…"
"Who's the current lover of your mistress?" Andrea interrupted her in an unemotional tone. "Does she receive the high aristocracy of Venice? Are the foreign ambassadors among her regular guests?"
"They usually come wearing masks," Smeraldina replied. "But I know that much that young Gritti is her favourite, she likes him more than any other before for as long as I've been in her service; even more than the Austrian ambassador, who courts her so ridiculously much. Do you know my countess, too? She's beautiful."
"I'm a stranger here, dear girl. I don't know her."
"You should know," the girl said with a clever face, "she wears a lot of make-up, though she isn't even thirty, yet. If you'd like to see her some time, nothing's easier than that. A board can bridge the distance between your window and mine. You'll climb across, and I'll lead you to a place where you'll be able to observe her quite clandestinely. The things I'd do for a neighbour! - But for now, it's good night. I'm being summoned."
"Good night, Smeraldina!"
She closed the window. "Poor - and ill," she said to herself, while pulling the curtains completely shut. "Oh well, still good enough to kill the boredom."