the Bridge of St. Angelo. The black archway which admitted you might
have served as the portal of the Augean stables, but you emerged
presently upon a mouldy little court, of which the fourth side was
formed by a narrow terrace, overhanging the Tiber. Here, along the
parapet, were stationed half a dozen shapeless fragments of sculpture,
with a couple of meagre orange-trees in terra-cotta tubs, and an
oleander that never flowered. The unclean, historic river swept beneath;
behind were dusky, reeking walls, spotted here and there with hanging
rags and flower-pots in windows; opposite, at a distance, were the bare
brown banks of the stream, the huge rotunda of St. Angelo, tipped with
its seraphic statue, the dome of St. Peter's, and the broad-topped pines
of the Villa Doria. The place was crumbling and shabby and melancholy,
but the river was delightful, the rent was a trifle, and everything was
picturesque. Roderick was in the best humor with his quarters from the
first, and was certain that the working mood there would be intenser
in an hour than in twenty years of Northampton. His studio was a huge,
empty room with a vaulted ceiling, covered with vague, dark traces of an
old fresco, which Rowland, when he spent an hour with his friend, used
to stare at vainly for some surviving coherence of floating draperies
and clasping arms. Roderick had lodged himself economically in the same
quarter. He occupied a fifth floor on the Ripetta, but he was only at
home to sleep, for when he was not at work he was either lounging in
Rowland's more luxurious rooms or strolling through streets and churches
and gardens.

Rowland had found a convenient corner in a stately old palace not far
from the Fountain of Trevi, and made himself a home to which books and
pictures and prints and odds and ends of curious furniture gave an air
of leisurely permanence. He had the tastes of a collector; he spent half
his afternoons ransacking the dusty magazines of the curiosity-mongers,