friend
at home sent my article to Vedder, I never thought him quite so cordial.

VI

And so the winter passed. For us there was always a refuge from our cold
rooms at the _cafe_ or at Vedder's, and it was seldom we did not profit
by it.

Occasionally during our rambles we stumbled unexpectedly upon old
friends "doing Italy" and genuinely glad to see us, as we were to see
them, inviting us to their hotels at every risk of the disapproval of
manager and porters and waiters; and so powerful was the influence of
Rome and the _cafe_ that now the marvel was to sit and listen to talk
about Philadelphia, and where everybody was going for the summer, and
who was getting married, and who had died, and what Philadelphia was
thinking and doing, as if, after all, there were still benighted people
in the world who believed not in art, but in Philadelphia as of supreme
importance.

Occasionally we made new friends outside of our pleasant _cafe_ life. I
have forgotten how, though I have not forgotten it was in Rome, thanks
to a letter of introduction from Dr. Garnett of the British Museum, that
we first met Miss Harriet Waters Preston, who, for her part, had already
introduced me to Mistral--how many Americans had heard of Mistral before
she translated _Mireio_?--and who now accepted us, cycling tweeds and
all, notwithstanding the shock they must have been to the admirably
appointed _pension_ where she stayed. She also climbed our six flights,
her niece and collaborator, Miss Louise Dodge, with her, probably both
busy that winter collecting facts for their _Private Life of the
Romans_, and where could they have found a more perfect background for
the past they were studying than when they looked down from our windows
over Rome, to the _Campagna_ beyond, and upon the horizon the shining
line that we knew was the Mediterranean,--over all the beauty that has
not changed in the meanwhile, though old streets and old villas and old
slums have vanished. And at these times, in the talk, not Philadelphia,
but literature was for a while art's rival.

And there were days when we played truant and climbed down in the
morning's first freshness from the high room overlooking Rome and the
work that had to be done in it, and loafed all day in Roman galleries
and at Roman ceremonies, or strayed to places further afield--Tivoli,
Albano, Ostia, Marino, Rocca di Papa,--getting back to Rome with feet
too tired to take us anywhere except up our six