Madonna's seeming amenability to their wishes stayed their insistence, and they could but respect her wishes to let the betrothal be delayed yet a little while.

And during the weeks that followed, it was I scarce know whether more pitiable or more amusing to see the efforts that Giovanni made to win her ardently desired affection.
Love has sharp eyes at times, and a dullard under the influence of the baby god will turn shrewd and exert rare wiles in the conduct of his wooing.

Giovanni, by some intuition usually foreign to his dull nature, seemed to divine what manner of man would be Madonna Paola's ideal, and strove to pass himself off as possessed of the attributes of that ideal, with an ardour that was pitiably comical.

He became an actor by the side of whom those comedians that played impromptus for his delectation were the merest bunglers with the art.

He gathered that Madonna Paola loved the poets and their stately diction, and so, to please her better, he became a poet for the season.
"Poeta nascitur" the proverb runs, and that proverb's truth was doubtless forced home upon the Lord Giovanni at an early stage of his excursions into the flowery meads of prosody.