udio and an apartment, and finally
found one in the upper story of a house on the Via di Ripetta. Before
moving into the studio, I met an old friend and fellow-artist, and as
there was room enough for two, gladly took him in with me.

The studio, with apartment, in the Via di Ripetta was by no means
unattractive. It was large, well lighted, comfortably and abundantly
furnished. It was, as I have said, at the top of the house, the studio
overlooked the Tiber, and the sitting-room and double-bedded
sleeping-room fronted the street. The large studio window was placed
rather high up, so that the entrance door--a wide, heavy affair, with
large hinges and immense complicated lock and a "judas"--opened from the
obscurity of the hall directly under the large window into the full
light of the studio. The roof of the house slanted from back to front,
so that the two rooms were lower studded than the studio, and an empty
space or low attic opening into the studio above them was partly
concealed by an ample and ragged curtain. The fireplace was in the
middle of the left wall as you entered the studio; the door into the
sitting-room was in the further right-hand corner, and the bedroom was
entered by a door on the right-hand wall of the sitting-room, so that
the bedroom formed a wing of the studio and sitting-room, and from the
former, looking through two doors, the bedroom window and part of the
street wall could be seen. Both the beds were hidden from sight of any
one in the studio, even when the doors were open.

The apartment was furnished in a way which denoted a certain amount of
liberality, but everything was faded and worn, though not actually
shabby or dirty. The carpets were threadbare, the damask-covered sofa
and chairs showed marks of the springs, and the gimp was fringed and
torn off in places. The beds were not mates; the basin and ewer were of
different patterns; the few pictures on the wall were, like everything
else in the place, curiously gray and dusty-looking, as if they had been
shut up in the darkened rooms for a generation. Beyond the fireplace in
the studio, the corner of the room was partitioned off by a dingy
screen, six feet high or more, fixed to the floor for the space of two
yards, with one wing which shut like a door, enclosing a small space
fitted up like a miniature scullery, with a curious and elaborate
collection of pots and pans and kitchen utensils, all hung in orderly
rows, but every article wi