ll their time to do it in.

[Footnote A: _Note._--Let me anticipate the amiable critic--and say that
I know this is not the Italian spelling of _cafe_. I use the French
spelling here, as in later chapters where it belongs, for the sake of
uniformity throughout.]

It is an arrangement I take now as a matter of course. But then, it must
be borne in mind, for me only five months separated Rome from
Philadelphia, and Philadelphia bonds are not easily broken. I suspected
something wrong in so agreeable a custom, as youth usually does in the
pleasant things of life, and as a Philadelphian always does in the
unaccustomed, and at first, when we went to the ancient _Greco_, I tried
to believe it was entirely the result of J.'s interest in a place where
artists had drunk coffee for generations. When we deserted it because,
despite its traditions, nobody went there any longer save a few
grey-bearded old men and a few gold-laced hall porters, and the dulness
fell like a pall upon us, and the atmosphere was rank, and when we
patronized instead a brand-new _cafe_ in the _Corso_ that called itself
in French the _Cafe de Venise_ and in English the _Meet of Best
Society_, I put down the attraction to the _Daily News_, to which the
_cafe_ subscribed, and for which in those days Andrew Lang was writing
the leaders everybody was reading. But Lang could not reconcile us to
the nightly _Gran Concerto_ of a piano, a flute and a violin of
indifferent merit concealed in a thicket of artificial trees, and the
_Best Society_ meant tourists, and after we had shocked a family of New
England friends by inviting them to share its tawdry pleasures with us,
and after a few evenings had given us, unaccompanied, all and more than
we could stand of it, we exchanged it for a _cafe_ without a past and
with no aspirations as the Meet of any save the usual _cafe_ society of
a big Italian town. By this time I had ceased to worry about excuses and
had settled down to idleness and coffee with as little scruple as the
natives.

The _cafe_ we chose was the _Nazionale Aragno_ in the Corso, the largest
and most gorgeous in Rome. The three or four rooms that opened one out
of the other had a magnificence that we could never have achieved in
furnished rooms and would not have wanted to if we could, and a
succession of mirrors multiplied them indefinitely. We leaned
luxuriously against blue plush, gilding glittered wherever gilding could
on white walls, waiters rush