Page:Maurice Hewlett--Little novels of Italy.djvu/82

70 Novello was dead at last, poor heroic gentleman, Verona was shaken off; Venice was supreme—easy, but unquestionably mistress of the Emilia. There was time to make madrigals, to make eyes, to make love, to imagine portraits. Mantegna was painting giants in the Eremitani and Bellini picking his brains, but not as yet a quarrel. The classics, the ingenuous arts, lovely woman—always interwoven when times are happiest—flourished in that sunny place: it was not really wonderful that Ippolita the stone-cutter's daughter, classically fair, indisputably a beauty, should win all seeing eyes and be the despair of all rhymers. Given the vision to the visionary (and both came in their time), she might be trusted with the rest; for she was remarkable by contrast; there were none like her. The Paduan girls are all charming, and mostly pretty. Ippolita was neither: she was beautiful, and when you came to know her face, lovely. They are brown, she was fair; they are little, she was very tall. They have eyes like a dove's, glossed brown; hers were deeply blue, the colour of the Adriatic when a fleeting cloud spreads a curtain of hyacinth over the sheeted turquoise bed. Beautifully hued in mingled red and white, delicately shaped, pliant, supple, and shy, such as she was (an honest, good girl, Heaven knows!) she might have lived and died in her alley—sweetheart of some half dozen decent fellows, wife of the most masterful, mother of a dozen brats, unnoticed save for her qualities of cheerful drudge and brood-mare; beautiful as a spring leaf till twenty, ripe as a peach on the wall till thirty, keen-faced