of the anemone ladies, the color and
romantic fashion of the uniforms, and the old princes who had been
pointed out to him: splendid old men wearing white mustaches and single
eye-glasses, as he had so long hoped and dreamed they did.

"Mine own people!" he whispered. "I have come unto mine own at last.
Mine own people!" After long waiting (he told himself), he had seen
them--the people he had wanted to see, wanted to know, wanted to
be _of!_ Ever since he had begun to read of the "beau monde" in his
schooldays, he had yearned to know some such sumptuous reality as that
which had come true to-day, when, at last, in Rome he had seen--as he
wrote home that night--"the finest essence of Old-World society mingling
in Cosmopolis."

Artificial odors (too heavy to keep up with the crowd that had
worn them) still hung about him; he breathed them deeply, his eyes
half-closed and his lips noiselessly formed themselves to a quotation
from one of his own poems:

While trails of scent, like cobweb's films
Slender and faint and rare,
Of roses, and rich, fair fabrics,
Cling on the stirless air,
The sibilance of voices,
At a wave of Milady's glove,
Is stilled--

He stopped short, interrupting himself with a half-cough of laughter as
he remembered the inspiration of these verses. He had written them three
months ago, at home in Cranston, Ohio, the evening after Anna McCord's
"coming-out tea." "Milady" meant Mrs. McCord; she had "stilled" the
conversation of her guests when Mary Kramer (whom the poem called a
"sweet, pale singer") rose to sing Mavourneen; and the stanza closed
with the right word to rhyme with "glove." He felt a contemptuous pity
for his little, untraveled, provincial self of three months ago, if,
indeed, it could have been himself who wrote verses about Anna McCord's
"coming-out tea" and referred to poor, good old Mrs. McCord as "Milady"!

The second stanza had intimated a conviction of a kind which only poets
may reveal:

She sang to that great assembly,
They thought, as they praised her tone;
But she and my heart knew better:
Her song was for me alone.

He had told the truth when he wrote of Mary Kramer as pale and sweet,
and she was paler, but no less sweet, when he came to say good-by to
her before he sailed. Her face, as it was at the final moment of the
protracted farewell, shone before him very clearly now for a mom