eeling it a disgrace, or a misfortune, to be
caught in the wrong clothes in the right place. But that year in Rome I
had not outgrown the first ardours of work and, besides, in the old
days, a cycle seemed an excuse for any and all degrees of shabbiness. In
my short skirts, at a time when short skirts were not the mode, covered
with mud, and carrying a tiny bag, I have walked into the biggest hotels
of Europe without a tremor, conscious that the cycle at the door was my
triumphant apology. The cyclist's dress, like the nun's uniform, was a
universal passport, and I have never had the cleverness to invent
another to replace it since I gave up cycling.

II

If we could not spend our nights in other people's houses, neither could
we spend them in the rooms we had taken for ourselves at the top of one
of the highest houses on the top of one of the highest hills in Rome.
There was no objection to the rooms: they were charming, but we had
found them on a warm November day when the sun was streaming in through
the windows that looked far and wide over the town, and beyond to the
_Campagna_, and still beyond to a shining line on the horizon we knew
was the Mediterranean, and we did not ask about anything save the price,
which to our surprise we could pay, and so we moved in at once. Nor for
days, as we sat at our work in the sunlight, the windows open and Rome
at our feet, did we imagine there could be anything to ask about, except
if, by asking, we could prevail upon the _Padrona's_ son-in-law to go
and blow his melancholy cornet anywhere rather than on the roof directly
over our heads. Living in rooms was the nearest approach I had made in
all my life to housekeeping, I was still in a state of wonderment at
everything in Rome, from Romulus and Remus on the morning pat of butter
to the November roses in full bloom on the Pincian, I was quite content
to let practical affairs and domestic details look out for
themselves--or, perhaps it would be more true to say that I never gave
them a thought.

But even in Rome the sun must set and November nights grow chill, and a
night came when, after a day of rain, a fire would have been pleasant,
and suddenly we discovered there was no place to make it in. It had
never occurred to us that there could not be, fresh as we were from the
land where heat in the house is as much a matter of course as a sun in
the sky. At first we wrapped ourselves in shawls and blankets, hired the
_padrona'