If you want to insult
him and make him bitterly hate you, tell him that Laura was a married
woman with a dozen children."
"Who was Laura?" asked Catherine; "and why should she not have a dozen
children?"
"Laura was a beautiful girl with golden hair and a green dress whom
Petrarch first saw in a church at Avignon," answered Hazard. "She was
painted among the frescoes of the cathedral, as you are being painted
now, Miss Brooke; and Petrarch wrote some hundreds of sonnets about her
which Wharton undertook to translate, and made me help him. We were
both poets then."
"I want to hear those sonnets," said Catherine, quite seriously, as
though the likeness between herself and Laura had struck her as the most
natural thing in the world. "Can you remember them?"
"I think I could. Don't find fault with me if you dislike the moral. I
approve it because, like Petrarch, I am a bit of a churchman, but I
don't know what you may think of a lover who begins by putting his
mistress on the same footing with his deity and ends by groaning over
the time he has thrown away on her."
"Not to her face?" said Esther.
"Worse! He saw her in church and wrote to her face something like this:
'As sight of God is the eternal life,
Nor more we ask, nor more to wish we dare,
So, lady, sight of thee,'
and so on, or words to that effect. Yet after she was dead he said he
had wasted his life in loving her.
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