Boccaccio. Fra Biagio! are you come from Samminiato for this? You need not put your finger there. We want no secrets. The girl knows her duty and does her business. I have slept well, and wake better. [Raising himself up a little.]
Why? who are you? It makes my eyes ache to look aslant over the sheets; and I cannot get to sit quite upright so conveniently; and I must not have the window-shutters opened, they tell me.
Petrarca. Dear Giovanni! have you then been very unwell?
Boccaccio. O that sweet voice! and this fat friendly hand of thine, Francesco!
Thou hast distilled all the pleasantest flowers, and all the wholesomest herbs of spring, into my breast already.
What showers we have had this April, ay! How could you come along such roads? If the devil were my labourer, I would make him work upon these of Certaldo. He would have little time and little itch for mischief ere he had finished them, but would gladly fan himself with an Agnus-castus, and go to sleep all through the carnival.
Petrarca. Let us cease to talk both of the labour and the labourer. You have then been dangerously ill?
Boccaccio. I do not know: they told me I was: and truly a man might be unwell enough, who has twenty masses said for him, and fain sigh when he thinks what he has paid for them. As I hope to be saved, they cost me a lira each. Assunta is a good market-girl in eggs, and mutton, and cow-heel; but I would not allow her to argue and haggle about the masses. Indeed she knows best whether they were not fairly worth all that was asked for them, although I could have bought a winter cloak for less money. However, we do not want both at the same time. I did not want the cloak: I wanted them, it seems. And yet I begin to think God would have had mercy on me, if I had begged it of him myself in my own house. What think you?
Petrarca. I think he might.
Boccaccio. Particularly if I offered him the sacrifice on which I wrote to you.