al, perhaps, to the love of the woman but more
familiar from the force of habit.

All men feel such impressions, and most of all those who follow a fixed
calling, and are accustomed to do their work in a certain place every
day. Theophile Gautier confessed in his latter days that he could not
work except in the office of the _Moniteur_--elsewhere, he said, he
missed the smell of the printers' ink, which brought him ideas. Artists
know well the effect of the atmosphere of the studio. Five minutes of
that paint-laden air suffice to make the outer world a mere dream, and
to recall the reality of work. There was an old dressing-gown to which
Thackeray was attached as to a friend, and which he believed
indispensable to composition. Balzac had his oval writing-room, when he
grew rich, and the creamy white colour of the tapestries played a great
part in his thoughts. The blacksmith loves the smoke of the forge and
the fumes of hot iron on the anvil, and the chiseller's fingers burn to
handle the tools that are strewn on the wooden bench.

Gianbattista stood at the door of the studio, and had he been master
instead of apprentice, he could not have resisted the desire to go to
his place and take up the work he had left on the previous evening. In a
few minutes he was hammering away as busily as though there were no such
thing as marriage in the world, and nothing worth living for but the
chiselling of beautiful arabesques on a silver ewer. His head was bent
over his hands, his eyes followed intently the smallest movements of the
tool he held, he forgot everything else, and became wholly absorbed in
his occupation.

Nevertheless, much of a chiseller's work is mechanical, and as the
smooth iron ran in and out of the tiny curves under the gentle tap of
the hammer, the young man's thoughts went back to the girl he had left
at the top of the stairs a quarter of an hour earlier; he thought of
her, as he did daily, as his promised wife, and he fell to wondering
when it would be, and how it would be. They often talked of the place in
which they would live, as they had done that morning; and as neither of
them was very imaginative, there was a considerable similarity between
the speculations they indulged in at one time and at another. It was
always to be a snug home, high up, with a terrace, pots of carnations,
and red curtains. Their only difference of opinion concerned the colour
of the walls and furniture. Like most Italians, they