For my part, I always distrust innocence. Wait one
moment, and I shall have the body and sleeves of this dress ready
for the needle-women. There, ring the bell, and order them up;
for I have directions to give, and you must interpret for me."
While Brigida went to the bell, the energetic Frenchwoman began
planning out the skirt of the new dress. She laughed as she
measured off yard after yard of the silk.
"What are you laughing about?" asked Brigida, opening the door
and ringing a hand-bell in the passage.
"I can't help fancying, dear, in spite of her innocent face and
her artless ways, that your young friend is a hypocrite."
"And I am quite certain, love, that she is only a simpleton."
CHAPTER II.
The studio of the master-sculptor, Luca Lomi, was composed of two
large rooms unequally divided by a wooden partition, with an
arched doorway cut in the middle of it.
While the milliners of the Grifoni establishment were
industriously shaping dresses, the sculptors in Luca Lomi's
workshop were, in their way, quite as hard at work shaping marble
and clay. In the smaller of the two rooms the young nobleman
(only addressed in the studio by his Christian name of Fabio) was
busily engaged on his bust, with Nanina sitting before him as a
model. His was not one of those traditional Italian faces from
which subtlety and suspicion are always supposed to look out
darkly on the world at large.
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