The Duchessa looked at the sunny landscape, the bright lawns,
the high bending trees, with the light caught in the network of
their million leaves; she looked at the laughing white villas
westward, the pale-green vineyards, the yellow cornfields; she
looked at the rushing river, with the diamonds sparkling on its
surface, at the far-away gleaming snows of Monte Sfiorito, at
the scintillant blue shy overhead.
Then she looked at Peter, a fine admixture of mirth with
something like gravity in her smile.
"The dark backward and abysm of space?" she repeated. "And you
do not wear black spectacles? Then it must be that your eyes
themselves are just a pair of black-seeing pessimists."
"On the contrary," triumphed Peter, "it is because they are
optimists, that they suspect there must be forwarder and more
luminous regions than the Solar System."
The Duchessa laughed.
"I think you have the prettiest mouth, and the most exquisite
little teeth, and the eyes richest in promise, and the sweetest
laughter, of any woman out of Paradise," said Peter, in the
silence of his soul.
"It is clear I shall never be your match in debate," said she.
Peter made a gesture of deprecating modesty.
"But I wonder," she went on, "whether you would put me down as
'another species of snatcher,' if I should ask you to spare me
just the merest end of a crust of bread?" And she lifted those
eyes rich in promise appealingly to his.
"Oh, I beg of you--take all I have," he responded, with
effusion. "But--but how--?"
"Toss," she commanded tersely.
So he tossed what was left of his bread into the air, above the
river; and the Duchessa, easily, deftly, threw up a hand, and
caught it on the wing.
"Thank you very much," she laughed, with a little bow.
Then she crumbled the bread, and began to sprinkle the ground
with it; and in an instant she was the centre of a cloud of
birds. Peter was at liberty to watch her, to admire the swift
grace of her motions, their suggestion of delicate strength, of
joy in things physical, and the lithe elasticity of her figure,
against the background of satiny lawn, and the further vistas
of lofty sunlit trees. She was dressed in white, as always--a
frock of I know not what supple fabric, that looked as if you
might have passed it through your ring, and fell in multitudes
of small soft creases. Two big red roses drooped from her
bodice. She wore a garden-hat, of white straw, with a big
daring rose-red bow, under which the dense meshes of her hair,
warmly dark, dimly bright, shimmered in a blur of brownish
gold.