Cynthia wanted very much to see the ceremony of blessing the horses that were to run in the race. Only ten of the seventeen wards might compete, due to the tiny race course, and these would be chosen by lot just before the race began. Each horse would be in the little chapel of its own _contrada_, so Cynthia chose the Snail, since that of all the ward names seemed to appeal to her most. It was so delightfully silly for a Snail to be running a race, even by proxy.
The chapel was a plain little building of warm stone, hidden in the lower edges of the walled town, and the room was already crowded with interested and loyal Snailists, including the horse, who seemed the most interested of all.
Cynthia listened with delight to the sonorous Latin phrases of the little priest, but almost burst into giggles at the horse’s astonished expression when his nose was sprinkled with water from a kind of overgrown silver pepper box. It was an emotional relief when she caught a glance from an amused gray eye, twinkling over the heads of the shorter Sienese and automatically she twinkled back at it. Then she saw a tuft of stiff white hair and recognized her acquaintance of the day before. Cynthia flushed and bit her lip. When she looked again he was gone.
Behind the chapel was a room used for exhibition purposes. Here in the dim glass cases, dusty with age, were the ancient costumes worn in past Palios by the jockeys of the Snail. Many of them were hundreds of years old and all displayed the same careful craftsmanship, the same loving care for detail that Cynthia had noted in the costumes she had seen on the streets.
She made some sketches in her notebook, and went back to the _pensione_ by way of the leather shop to have another look at the frame in the window.
Back in her room she emptied her pocketbook on the bed, and counted her express checks and lire. But the frame was hopeless. She just couldn’t manage it, not even if she asked the shop keeper to come down in his price. The price was fair, Cynthia felt that it was even more than that, and one couldn’t ask a fellow artist to cheapen his wares.
“I’m afraid, Chick darling,” she told the photograph propped between the mirror and the hair brush, “you’ll just have to go as you are. Maybe a little later ...”