They might have been sisters, those many successive loves, or one and
the same lady over and over again, in slightly varied humour and
attire perhaps, at the different intervals of some rather lengthy,
mimetic masque of love, to which the theatrical dress of that day was
appropriate; [65] for the mannered Italian, or Italianised, artists,
including the much-prized, native Janet, with his favourite water-
green backgrounds, aware of the poet's predilection, had given to all
alike the same brown eyes and tender eyelids and golden hair and
somewhat ambered paleness, varying only the curious artifices of the
dress--knots, and nets, and golden spider-work, and clear, flat
stones. Dangerous guests in that simple, cloistral place, Sibyls of
the Renaissance on a mission from Italy to France, to Gaston one and
all seemed under the burden of some weighty message concerning a
world unknown to him; the stealthy lines of cheek and brow contriving
to express it, while the lips and eyes only smiled, not quite
honestly. It had been a learned love, with undissembled "hatred of
the vulgar.
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