all their religion too.

Why do you not set yourselves to make us more abundant in those joyless
homes, in those sunless windows?

* * *

For the life of a painter is beautiful when he is still young, and loves
truly, and has a genius in him stronger than calamity, and hears a voice
in which he believes say always in his ear, "Fear nothing. Men must
believe as I do in thee, one day. And meanwhile--we can wait!"

And a painter in Paris, even though he starve on a few sous a day, can
have so much that is lovely and full of picturesque charm in his daily
pursuits: the long, wondrous galleries full of the arts he adores; the
_realite de l'ideal_ around him in that perfect world; the slow, sweet,
studious hours in the calm wherein all that is great in humanity alone
survives; the trance--half adoration, half aspiration, at once desire
and despair--before the face of the Mona Lisa; then, without, the
streets so glad and so gay in the sweet, living sunshine; the quiver of
green leaves among gilded balconies; the groups at every turn about the
doors; the glow of colour in market-place and peopled square; the quaint
grey piles in old historic ways; the stones, from every one of which
some voice from the imperishable Past cries out; the green and silent
woods, the little leafy villages, the winding waters garden-girt; the
forest heights, with the city gleaming and golden in the plain; all
these are his.

With these--and youth--who shall dare say the painter is not rich--ay,
though his board be empty, and his cup be dry?

I had not loved Paris--I, a little imprisoned rose, caged in a clay pot,
and seeing nothing but the sky-line of the roofs. But I grew to love it,
hearing from Rene and from Lili of all the poetry and gladness that
Paris made possible in their young and burdened lives, and which could
have been thus possible in no other city of the earth.

City of Pleasure you have called her, and with truth; but why not also
City of the Poor? For what city, like herself, has remembered the poor
in her pleasure, and given to them, no less than to the richest, the
treasure of her laughing sunlight, of her melodious music, of her
gracious hues, of her million flowers, of her shady leaves, of her
divine ideals?

_PIPISTRELLO._

It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the
Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men. It had as many
chambers as one of the palaces dow