cycling and not bother because we were not dressed; we could
welcome our friends the more cordially because, as we did not provide
the entertainment, it was no offence to us if they did not like it, nor
to them if we failed to sit it out. In the _cafe_ we found the "oblivion
of care," the same "freedom from solitude," though not the big words to
express it, which Dr. Johnson "experienced" in a tavern. Were all social
functions run on the same broad principles, society would not be half
the strain it is upon everybody's patience and good-nature and purse.

Almost all the group were artists. In those days artists and students
were no longer rushing to Rome as the one place to study art in, nor had
the effort begun to revive its old reputation among them. Still a good
many were always about. Some lived there, others, like ourselves, were
spending the winter, or else were just passing through, and, once we had
collected the group round our table, I do not believe we were ever left
to pass an evening alone.

Artists were as great a novelty to me as the _cafe_--I had been married
so short a time that J. had not ceased to be a problem, if he ever
has--and nothing was more amazing to me than the talk. Its volubility
took my breath away. I thought of the back parlour at home after dinner,
my Father playing interminable games of Patience, the rest of us deep in
our books until bed-time. And these men talked as if talk was the only
business, the only occupation of life.

Still more surprising was the subject of their talk. If they had so much
to say that it made me grateful I was born a listener, they had only one
thing to say it about. It was art from the moment we met until we
parted, though we might sit over our coffee for hours. Often it was next
morning when J. and I reached the house at the top of the hill, and he
dragged the huge key from his pocket, undid the ponderous lock and
struck the overgrown match, or undersized candle, by which the Roman lit
himself to his rooms, and we panted up our six flights afraid ours would
not last, for we had but the one supplied by the restaurant.

The quality of the talk was as amazing: bewildering, revolutionary, to
anybody who had never heard art talked about by artists, as I never had
before I met J. All I had thought right turned out to be wrong, all I
had never thought of was right, all that was essential to the critic of
art, to the Ruskin-bred, had nothing to do with it whatever